Alignment Refinement

There is little more confusing in the D&D universe than the concept of alignment. This said, I would also venture to surmise there are fewer articles written about alignment than any other subject in D&D.

There is little more confusing in the D&D universe than the concept of alignment. This said, I would also venture to surmise there are fewer articles written about alignment than any other subject in D&D. The Players' Handbook reads, "A character's or creature's general moral and personal attitudes are represented by its alignment. . ." (page 87).

It goes on to say, "Alignment is a tool for developing your character's identity." (page 144). The Dungeon Master's Guide seems more concerned about changing alignment: "A character can have a change of heart. Alignments aren't commitments, except in specific cases (such as for paladins and clerics)." Accepting the subject of alignment is at best very complicated, it might be worthwhile to examine a different perspective on the whole thing.

In my twenty-five years of D&D I've come to realize a better understanding of alignment and its affects on the game adds a definite dimension to the game a roll of the dice cannot provide. Most of the time, players tend to view alignment as purely a surface identification. They tend to either meta-game, playing only themselves, or fall into poor theatrics, which include cliches, alter egos, or maniacs, just for the purpose of entertainment. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with these motivations; however, I'd like to present an alternative way of viewing the possibilities of alignment. "Real life" examples are an excellent way to examine how it can be used best within game play.

Basically, alignment is the moral and ethical fabric in which your character is cloaked. It's the foundation and framework to support and house religion, codes of behavior, and rules of one character's engagement within its world. Essentially, alignment is your character and vice versa. Perhaps one of the biggest reasons this subject is tiptoed around so much could be it honestly "hits too close to home" for nearly all of us! How close? How close do you want it to be? And how honestly and deeply do you want to delve?

I cannot think of a better way to explore alignment than to cite both historical and contemporary examples of various real and fictitious characters in our human experience. However, it is an unavoidably sensitive subject; and for obvious reasons of diplomacy and sensitivity I cannot fully name many personalities. See? It is tricky. I'll throw in some examples of what I would expect from characters of each alignment in my gaming experience.

Lawful Good

King Arthur - knights, chivalry, loyalty, and round tables

Wyatt Earp - the badge versus the bad guys

Batman - the caped crusader himself

Ghandi - peaceful, lawful protest for change

Sherlock Holmes - except for the opium part, that is, it's elementary

In my games, the lawful good character won't break into the shop, even if the stolen goods are in there.

Neutral Good

Captain Kirk - What Prime Directive?

George Washington - nothing lawful about revolution, until you win it

Conan - whatever it takes

Lone Ranger - same, but he wears white

Zorro - undisciplined but structured in a way

You're a nice, likeable guy who will make his own rules if necessary to obtain an outcome for the overall good.

Chaotic Good

Zeus - a bolt here, a bolt there, but had the Romans' best at heart

Sir Lancelot - love before loyalty

Robin Hood - to heck with the upper class

Spiderman - pretty improbable feats and tangled webs

Harry Callaghan - You feel lucky, punk?

As a chaotic good character, you'll definitely make waves and drive the others batty with your pet peeves and methods. However, remember, you may not plan well or consider consequences.

Lawful Neutral

Mr. Spock - perfectly logical, Captain

Merlin - science has its own law

Nostradamus - it's gonna happen anyway

Soviet Russia - a law unto its own, whether it worked or not

The IRS - It's not personal, but you have to pay us

In a Scorpio game you'll split the treasure evenly every time, no matter who you are.

Neutral

The animal kingdom - purely reactionary, or we like to think so

Napoleon Bonaparte - he was a bit of everything combined, so a lot of it cancelled out

Alexander the Great - where Napoleon learned it all

This is one of the hardest alignments to play accurately. You either combine everything or leave it all out. It's tough to even imagine being this unbiased.

Chaotic Neutral

Henry VIII-didn't believe much, and made up his own lines as he went

Al Capone - wasn't really evil, just really greedy

Andrew Carnegie - the buck was everything, forget who did the work

You'll be the first character to leave the game since you won't have a whole lot of interest in your fellow players.

Lawful Evil

Lucifer - allowed to torment man through whole history of the Church tradition

Darth Vader - the dark side is just that

Ebeneezer Scrooge - took just as much advantage as he could

Klingons - all about honor, but a really twisted kind

The Sheriff of Nottingham - loyal to the wrongful king

Your character has already planned how to end up on top. Law and order aren't always about good, and the appearance of order can camouflage evil intent.

Chaotic Evil

Charles Manson - complete criminal depravity, without rhyme or reason

Caligula - one of the reasons Rome fell

Blackbeard - -supposedly loved to torture for the sake of it

Vlad the Impaler (the real Dracula) - impaled for the sake of it (for the stake of it?)

Bonnie and Clyde - came to the point where they just didn't care and it wasn't about the money any more.

A chaotic evil alignment probably will be killed by his fellow players. There is little sense and virtually no entertainment value to this disordered a character, since a true chaotic evil creature will not join a group to begin with.

Neutral Evil

Adolf Hitler - implemented his own "law" and justified chaos for it

Numerous current dictators - predictably unpredictable

This is the most dangerous of the evil alignments, because with no emotional attachments, there is nothing to lose; hence, there are no limits. I've never seen a player pull this one off. Your humanity would get in the way.

To sum this up, alignment is all about choosing and playing by certain guidelines. When you choose an alignment, play it carefully. Remember the details, such as how a character would react or decide in any particular set of circumstances or confrontations. Don't be surprised if, in playing a character different from your perception of yourself, you discover things aren't quite as you assumed. Gotcha!

I have some minor gripes about the examples of alignment you gave. Klingons, for instance, would be "Alignment: usually lawful (any)" I think.

I severely disagree with your take on Lancelot though, and by extension I doubt you really understand alignments all that well (or at least, in a similar way as I do).

Lancelot is lawful good, it's just that love overcame is usual tendencies of loyalty to the king. It's not as if he just shrugged and threw away his loyalty at the drop of a hat or anything! That would've been distinctly chaotic. But he didn't.

I also disgree with your conclusion.
"To sum this up, alignment is all about choosing and playing by certain guidelines."

On the contrary. Alignment is about selecting your moral and personal parameters, and then selecting the alignment that best matches it.
If alignment was just a way to pigeonhole people into nine archetypes, it never would've lasted. It is just a handy tool, a nice gizmo in the gamemechanics (various anti-alignment spells), but nothing more.

"Remember the details, such as how a character would react or decide in any particular set of circumstances or confrontations."

All lawful neutral characters immediately flip open a book of law whenever something special happens? None of them would happen to have any distinct cultural, racial, religeous, or personal biasses? Sorry, I don't agree.
Alignment does not determine how you react. Your own personality determines that (and it determines alignmnet as well, coincidentally).

One thing about the Alignment 'system'as a game mechanic is that opinions concerning it are as varied as the players themselves.
Good point on the Klingons,I'll grant you that. But if you have studied much about Arthur and the Knights, Lancelot really was a loose cannon...my interpretation of 'chaotic' does not preclude 'loyalty', but 'allegiance' is a much more restrictive thing...and the two are mutually exclusive yet often paraphrased.
In the Game setting, you do 'Choose' an alignment for your character, and 'play' by the guidelines associated by that alignment. The degree of moral and personal parameters you 'role-play' is up to you.True 'Role-Playing' is acting as a being other than yourself,and if your character has distinct biases, then that becomes part of the character.Reaction to circumstances is part of the character, hence, the character's personality determines how they react to a given situation. And if personality 'determines alignment',as you said, then then you are either role-playing yourself, or not role-playing at all.
Thanks for the comment!

The main thing to remember is that Alignment in the D&D world isn't just morality and ethics.. it's a real, verifiable quantity with real effects (like being hedged by a Prot. From Alignment spell) and when you die, you go straight to the outer plane appropriate to it. Heck, there's even 3 different planes possible for any given alignment!
It can be hard to relate that to real life, where it involves concepts like "loyalty" and winners write the history books.

"And if personality 'determines alignment',as you said, then then you are either role-playing yourself, or not role-playing at all."

I think you misunderstood me. It is the PC's personality that determines his alignment, not the player's.
For example, in a Dark Sun campaign I once played a thri-kreen (mantis-like humanoid) cleric, whose hivemind-mentality made him usually obey whatever the partyleader wanted. As a conformist and follower, I made him lawful neutral. His personality determined his alignment.
I myself am not of the hivemind mentality. I wasn't roleplaying myself, but I was most certainly roleplaying.

Belphanior
"This is a cool sig."

PS: Ever noticed how you can debate about alignments endlessly and never reach a solution? ^_^

Classifying Batman as Lawful Good seems appropriate when one is talking about the Golden Age/Adam West/Robin With Bikini Shorts Batman. The modern Dark Knight (with Kevin Conroy as the voice) strikes me as more Neutral Good given how he sometimes skirts the legalities of Gotham City to achieve his objectives.

Palladium's Alignment System is an interesting variation, with the lack of a True Neutral alignment which is replaced by Selfish (not necessarily uncaring) and a brief list of what behaviors are typical in that alignment's parameters.

Ok, let me catch up...
Aubri-Very true, and there lies another importance of alignment as a 'Game Mechanic'.My use of 'real life' was intended to give examples that players might think about other than the typical stereotypes.
Belphanior-Exactly my point. You *chose* the character you wanted to play, and 'made him' Lawful Neutral.As I said,
"To sum this up, alignment is all about choosing and playing by certain guidelines."
Pete-You're right, I guess I was addressing the masses.

"To sum this up, alignment is all about choosing and playing by certain guidelines."

Of course alignments have some guidelines inherent to them, but in my opinion you skipped a step.
If I understand you correctly, your method is:
Pick Alignment --> Look up guidelines and adhere to them --> Base remaining details of personality accordingly.
I base this on the following statement: "(that) alignment is the moral and ethical fabric in which your character is cloaked."
I think that you're of the opinion that alignment supersedes most (if not all) other factors.

In my opinion the process goes like this:
Pick Personality ---> Look up alignment that best matches it --> adhere to personality at all times (and thereby one can never violate alignment in the first place).

In my opinion alignment does not supersede (nor is it superseded by) any other factors. I think alignment merely *describes* personality, not dictates it.

It's entirely possible we've both been saying the same thing though and we just misunderstood eachother. If so, we should be feeling mighty silly by now.
;)

I usually do feel silly!
I think, subconciously or not, that we tend to pick the Personality/Alignment at the same time...I think they are one and the same.
I quote you,"I think alignment merely *describes* personality, not dictates it."...but I think it does both...
I wrote,
"Basically, alignment is the moral and ethical fabric in which your character is cloaked. It's the foundation and framework to support and house religion, codes of behavior, and rules of one character's engagement within its world. Essentially, alignment is your character and vice versa."
Character=Personality=Alignment?

Personally I tend to dislike alignment systems in general. People (and boths PCs and NPCs by extension) are dynamic, thinking, learning individuals. Every day we are forced to make decisions based on current circumstances, and that makes it nearly impossible to come up with a specific list of do's and dont's for any given person.

Belphanior has it right in my opinion. Your character's personality and personality traits should be well defined, but if they are alignment really isn't neccesary. What purpose does it serve really? It is basically just a stereotype that you are penalized for breaking. How can every person ever born fit into one of nine categories?

How many people in your life do you know who you can call 'evil' or 'good'? We all have flaws. We are all selfish at times. We all do things for different reasons. Therefore it seems very difficult to pigeonhole someone that easily.

The system is just too rigid in D&D. Palladium did a much better job of it in my opinion, but I still run my games without alignment.

There are a couple of reasons Alignment has hung around through three D&D iterations, IMO:
1. It's an easy way for not-so-great (or just lazy) role-players to pigeonhole their characters. It allows them to say, "well, my character is CG, so I don't care about the law, I kill the evil dude" rather than actually considering what their character's personality would dictate. Even a LG character can consider (and perform) a CE act in the right situation.
2. Deleting alignment means deleting several widely-used spells and abilities. No more Detect Evil/Good, no more Know Alignment, no more Prot. from Evil/Good. You *could* modify those skills to affect/detect hostile Outsiders (of whatever "alignment"), and if I end up running a game in the future that's probably what I'll do. I'm not sure just how much that would change the Paladin, among other things.

It might also be possible to just use alignment as a "suggestion" rather than as a hard requirement; that is, your character might detect as LG, but if he takes a non-LG action, he's not penalized (though he might be penalized because that same action causes a deity's disapproval, or a violation of his moral code). In this version alignment would be a general classification rather than a hard and fast equivalent to the char's moral code.

That is a valid point-as a 'game mechanic' the concept of Alignment has created elements of the game which are dependent on it...if one was to discard Alignment,or even water it down to a PC 'trait', they would have to re-evaluate certain spells, artifacts, classes, and for the most part, the commonly used Religious Pantheons...
Food for thought....

It could be argued that alignment exists only because of the spells used to detect and interact with it. Your average game session does not require alignment at all. The players, regardless of alignment, typically cooperate against an enemy. Good, bad... who's the guy with the gun?

Batman, definitely NOT a lawful character. He is and always has acted outside of the law. I'll grant in the past he was more accepted by the police of Gotham, but he is not a Lawful Good personality. He is much more NG or even CG.

Hitler. Well, that's a whole kettle or worms. As a fascist, he was Lawful. The rest of his actions tipped him onto the Evil plane.

Most of the rest are ok. I'd maybe bump Napoleon up to LN, but that's only because of his work in restructuring the legal system. Napoleonic Code anyone?

To classify the Klingons as evil is to classify any tribal/social group with a warrior's ethos as evil. Klingons are meant to embody the concept of the proud warrior. Think Wulfgar's people from Salvatore's books.

I think the article is good, we do need to see more articles written on the subject of the alignment system. We just need to make sure the articles don't start reading like a dissertation for a Philosophy class.

Thanks, Wooz,
Don't worry, I never paid attention in Philosophy Class...
I already retracted my 'Klingon' statement.Now I retract Batman. Hitler?Sure fascism is lawful. Genocide isn't!
The Napoleonic Code is a facade of Law but was subject to purely whimsical interpretation and execution (no pun intended)...
I'm seriously trying to envision the game without any reference to alignments at all...
Thanks!

aeon: Okay, so it's a chicken and egg problem. Either way, ridding ourselves of alignment means killing those spells/abilities, so the problem is unchanged.

Wooz:
Hitler def. not Lawful. I'm reading through Churchill's memoirs of WW2 (which start at the end of WWI), and probably 90% of all the crap Hitler pulled was not in any way indicative of a Lawful nature. While he "sort of" came to power lawfully (in that he was actually appointed by the actual Chancellor at the time), he only was appointed because his own paramilitary forces -- the SA, or brownshirts -- were severely dangerous to the actual government (and in case you were wondering, raising a personal army to challenge the government forces is NOT a lawful act). Hitler's rise to power and Germany's rearmament is one long saga of illegal, chaotic, unlawful acts. I would put Hitler squarely in NE (he did have some respect for history/traditions, namely the German martial tradition, so he can't be completely chaotic).

Scorpio: Think of any other way to tell a story. Neither drama, nor movies, nor literature reference any sort of arbitrary alignment system (even D&D based books!). At most they reference never-delineated "good" and "evil". Know Alignment is rather a stupid spell from the role-playing (as opposed to game mechanic) side anyway, and Detect Good/Evil and their counterparts could just be left open to DM interpretation of whether something is "evil" enough to be detected. You can create any character in the books without reference to alignment at all. As an example, take the paladin. Right now the paladin *must* be LG, which makes little sense to me. To me, a paladin can be described as a religious warrior whose deity has rewarded his dedication by granting him certain gifts.
With that in mind, we don't need the Lawful bit, because we can just observe that a paladin is going to adhere very, very closely to his deity's code of conduct (whether explicit or not). The Good part not only isn't necessary, it's counterintuitive -- why shouldn't Neutral and Evil deities be capable of creating their own holy warriors? (The Good requirement only makes sense if you consider that it's meant to discourage characters from playing evil chars, but since they're supposed to be discouraged anyway, why bother?)

"Need"...there might be the rub-perhaps 'alignment' per se should only apply to classes that have a need for moral/ethic structure...Clerics...Monks...?Or...
What if practicing a moral/ethic code was a skill.....?

The thing to remember about the D&D alignment system was that it is the bastard love-child of J. R. R. Tolkien and Micheal Moorcock. In Tolkien's universe, there were some absolutes, i.e.; elves were universally good, orcs were universally bad. Humans had free will to choose either side, though with some tendencies; Numemorians are generally disposed to good, Easterlings to evil.

In Moorcock's multiverse, there were pantheons of Law and Chaos. A plane could suffer from having too much of either.

For both, it was often important for the heroes to know which side they were on, because when the big apocalyptic battle came, they needed to know where their loyalties lay.

Gygax combined the two systems. D&D was all about archetypes. The alignment system was a tool to keep characters in their pidgeon holes. A ranger needed an alignment because they are modeled on Tolkien's Dunedain of the north, and they are unversally good. Paladins are universally lawful and good, because the Paladins were originally the elite guards of Charlemagne, and their purpose was to uphold his laws and keep local warlords in check. I'm not sure why druids were supposed to be true neutral.

Well, it did work pretty well, because it's still around after 25+years! I was playing the earliest versions of it in the mid-70's...and if you think about it, it was brilliant to combine the two. However, the Alignment system is either 'outdated' or worn thin, as the banter here suggests.

Avenel-I understand what you're saying. And I'm still not crazy about the 3E skills, and feats, blah blah-it's overly-complicated in it's mechanics (but easy to understand).The alignment system is easy enough mechanically, but as we know, subject to a million interpretations. A game designer on another forum came up with an alignment system with like 108 possible 'alignments' to choose from, now there's pigeonholing. So what is the answer?

I don't know that there is any one right answer. The answer I prefer is 'good role-playing'. I feel a player should flesh out, at least in thier own mind, how their character thinks, what her limits are, how far will he go, what are her politics, religion, morals, how does his family act, and is he supportive or rebellious, and once that frame work is established, be consistent within it, or if shifting, understand what pressures are causing the change, and where these changes are leading.

But that's very complicated. If the players just want to dungeon crawl and collect loot, it's probably unnecessary. If they want to tell complex, nuanced stories, full of shades of grey, and all the foibles mortal (or immortal, or dead) flesh is heir to, then it's probably necessary.

Our group solved the alignment dilema by taking a survey.
the survey included the following areas:
Alignment (current system)
...What you want to be
...What would you do if pressed
---
Nature & Demeanor
Personality traits List of 50, Pick 10 - 15 - No contradiction unles DMs allows
---
20 situation questions on how you character would react.
They range from helping friends in a bar fight, to saving people, to party dbetrails and they find out etc...
---
Heirarchy of personal motivation
1 - 10 (from a list)
---
Character ultimate goal in life
How they (in a nutshell) plan to attain that goal
---

Once the survey is done. The DM reads, makes any notes needed.
Generates an edited version of this removing all of the private (not known by the players info) and then passes out a copy to the group to read.

This takes about 3 days to do well.

As long as the players stays within the boundaries of what they wrote up, there is no problem with their alignment.
If a fellow player notices a variation in action - The DM notes it
If the Dm notices a variation in action - The DM notes it

If 12 notes are aquired, the DM & Player discuss their alignment. Changes are made (if/as needed) and then a new alignment is handed out to the players.

Penalties for changing alignments: DM asks the players first.
weighs the ideas, and then privately discusses the penalties.
Previous penalties (MINOR: No xp for the encounter which pushed them past the 12 notes mark. SEVERE: Loss of a Level, Special Item, or When healed by Divine means, Use d6 instead of d8)

My method:
Only the DM knows the character's alignment. (MWAHAHAHAH!)
Good: Generally tries to help people. Evil: Doesn't try to help people. Ever. Unless there's something in it for them. Doesn't have compuctions about harming people if there's something in it for them. Neutral: Helps people if it's convenient, doesn't go out of their way to harm them.

Lawful: Obeys the law, likes things orderly. Chaotic: Sometimes breaks the law just for the heck of it, likes things messy and unpredictable. Neutral: Obeys fair laws, mostly because it's easier to, only disobeys them if they are wrong. The other axis helps to determine this.

Most of the time it's not an issue, because the game mechanics things can be handled by the GM. When a player starts acting like an alignment that doesn't fit a class (or any) requirement, the GM tells them "You had a dream last night, about (said event that didn't fit w/ vow) and your god (or nature force, or whatnot) reprimanded you for not acting in keeping with his/her/its teachings. You behaved in the manner of a disciple of (name of force associated with offending action(s)). If you wish to remain under my protection (or whatever), you must take this action in the future: . . ..)

That's just how I do it. Not saying there's anything right or wrong with above method. It doesn't normally come up in my games because I do sci-fi, non magic campaign.

I use to prefer Oddysey's method, and for the most part, it's still similar to what I do now. Oddysey describes a great way to keep everything in game. But over the last several years, I've dropped GM alignment "railing." I tell the players to act how they want their characters to; the alignments will reflect their actions and not the other way around. How do I fairly and honestly judge their PCs? By Jury!

Every once in a while (usually once every 2 months), we'll spend an evening of just straightening out character sheets and XP points and item lists. On these nights, I ask the group to critique each other on alignment adherence. Some of these nights are better than the gaming sessions just on intensity alone! Highly recommended!

I'd hardly say it was abberant, Mystic Assassin. I'd say that humans, being creatures of whims and unpredictability, will generally NOT act in a way which is in D&D terms 'lawful', and generally do not class themselves as being either good or evil. We all have aspects of us which are evil, just as we all have aspects which are good. Therefore we could be classified as nuetral. Since we are generally not 'lawful' in our thinking, and we are prone to changing our minds, we are chaotic. Chaotic nuetral. I rest my case, no further questions, your honour...

While most people are in-between extremes most modern "industrialized world" humans tend towards Lawfull and Neutrality with a bit of goodness.
Laws are everywhere and most tend to follow them until they get too much in the way of their selfish objectives upon which time they bend or break the rules.

Chaotic neutrals are anarchists who will not tolerate any rules.
Chaotic goods see individual freedom and rights as the most important thing.

Lawful Goods think that the common good can only be found if fair and just rules are set and enforced (with necessary strength at times).

Lawfull evils are despots. They are selfish but recognize the need for social order in things.

Chaotic Evils will not only live in anarchy but force others into it and break any rule to get to their goals.

All neutrals don't care about the extremes or strive for ballance between them.

That was my grain of salt.

And Olly, you might get away with a few things by being chaotic but eventually you or probably your character will face the consequence of his actions. Especially if you always play the same kind of anarchist.

My character's not an anarchist, he's more of an anti-hero. A free spirit, if you will. He started off as chaotic good, but I found that too obnoxious and 'rebel-like' for my liking. If you're chaotic nuetral, you're neither a rebel or an anarchist, because, being nuetral, you have nothing to rebel or promote anarchy against. My character could be described as being a bit like Wolverine (but less hairy, and non-smoking), or Aragorn in his Strider incarnation (Before he went all goody-goody as Aragorn and later, Ellessar). He's capable of caring, even having beliefs, and he intentionally stays out of the way of the agents of order, but ultimately he makes his own rules.

Also, by my reckoning, I think that lawful evil, is more of a 'cunning planner' kind of character. Sort of like Hamlet, in the respect that, although he plots and dreams of committing all these dreadful crimes, and doing all these dreadful things, he's ultimately all thought and no action. Likewise, chaotic evil is all action and no thought.

Oh, and I KNOW, I just KNOW that someone is going to inform me about how, actually, Strider is a kind, caring, law-abiding individual, as opposed to the mysterious, reckless, rough-around-the-edges frontiersman that I see him as, because he didn't kill the hobbits and take the ring for himself, and because he ordered the vegetarian option from the Prancing Pony's menu, or some other such ludicrous thing.

One reason I prefer the anti-hero over the run-of-the-mill goodie-good-good PC is this...

After burning the village of unfortunate innocents, raping the women and stealing the children for human-sacrifice, the Evil Overlord will find himself run-through by the PCs blade: pushed off the cliff inside the volcano unto a fire-breathing ocean of death, after being beaten and disarmed at the end of a five minute sword fight where he fell victim to every cheap shot and cowardly trick that he HIMSELF would normally use against a more GOOD-natured opponent.

One reason I prefer the anti-hero over the run-of-the-mill goodie-good-good PC is this...

After burning the village of unfortunate innocents, raping the women and stealing the children for human-sacrifice, the Evil Overlord will find himself run-through by the PCs blade: pushed off the cliff inside the volcano unto a fire-breathing ocean of death, after being beaten and disarmed at the end of a five minute sword fight where he fell victim to every cheap shot and cowardly trick that he HIMSELF would normally use against a more GOOD-natured opponent.

I see that I have wandered albeit by chance into a debate between men of wit and erudition. I am moved to participate.

The D&D Alignment system is simple, flexible, and reasonably comprehensive. Certainly adequate to all but those who love complexity for the sake of it.

However, there are some campaigns, as has already been noted, that are very strongly aligned. To stay true to the campaign, you need to play it in the spirit in which it was designed.

For example, Moorcock's stories are heavily aligned in terms of Law and Chaos. But Good and Evil are almost absent. In general, Law seems to be less evil than chaos, but there is not a lot of difference. In general, both sets of followers seem to act in their own interest. In other words Evil seems to be dominant.

Another example is Andre Nortons Witch World, which is heavily aligned in terms of Dark and Light. Dark is really really bad, and Light is heroic goodness. Law and chaos may be there implicitly, but they pale into insignificance as motivating factors when placed against the backdrop of the cosmic battle of Dark/Light.

Mystic assassin has made an interesting point above. He says he prefers the anti hero because he can pay the evildoer back in his own coin. Indeed this is more and more a feature of modern heroes. Look at most heroes in films today, and they are only moderately less bad than the villains who's ass they kick. This can make for a very powerful and realistic character.

But my own choice is very different. I play the good guy because my favorite heroes have always been good guys. In a world full of ambiguity and downright evil, I give my respect to those who refuse to compromise their convictions for mere expediency. That doesn't mean you can't stick it to the bad guy. It just means you have to act with justice, compassion, and even mercy if it might do some good.

Well in Return of the King I'll Give you that. But he seems much less lawfull in Fellowship and the begining of two towers.

I say that because a Lawfull Character would not shy away from his responsibilities as heir to the kingdom of men. Of course he is as generous, selfless and honourable as they come. But he goes against tradition and "accepted ways" all too often to be lawfull.
Living a ranger's life, enamouring himself with a half-elf, refusing his destiny untill after Helmsdeep.

Etc.

As he comes to terms with his destiny I guess he decides to "settle" down and becomes les chaotic, as most rulers should be.

But, at the beginning, living by his wits, smoking in dark corners, behaving in a mysterious manner and saying things like "Are you frightened? Not nearly frightened enough!" leads me towards the chaotic nuetral alignment.

Aragorn is unquestionably good. In the D&D alignment system we all know, and, in my case, despise, I'd call him Neutral Good. He has enough esteem for law to be king, but he also values his personal freedom.

I imagine that you could be confused for thinking him as 'Good', in that he opposes evil, but he's quite clearly nuetral. He does not take up the cup of being king, instead, if I may quote the lines of the late, great Mr. Bean;

"Living in the shadows, scared of who you are. What you are. You are afraid!"

In Fellowship Of The Ring, he goes about, dressed in black, calling himself Strider, and generally being scary and intimidating. As Mr. Butterbur says;

"One o' them rangers of the North. Dangerous folk, they are. Nobody's quite sure of his real name, but 'round 'ere, he's known as Strider'

Also, as a ranger, Aragorn, then going by the sobriquet of Strider, would have to live in the inhospitable wilds, hunting for food, defending himself against wild beasts etc. and therefore would not act in as far as good and evil is concerned, merely survival instinct. Nuetrality. And, since nature is not, by it's erm... nature, orderly, he would have to behave in a 'chaotic' way. See where I'm going with this?

Notice also that at Amon Hen, he does not accompany Frodo on his journey, leaving yon hobbit to go it alone, with big, fat, stupid Sam on his tail, as well as Gollum making silly remarks and plotting to murder them. Had Aragorn been there, Gollum would have had this vocal chords relocated outside of his body at the first opportunity, and he would have lead them there himself.

So, I believe, nuetral. If not a chaotic nuetral, at that.
(Arrogant smile, cocksure swagger)

As for #1: Batman is scary and intimidating, but no one would call him neutral.

As for #2: Nope, I don't buy that one either. That requisite could describe someone of any alignment.

Alignment isn't how you *seem*: it's how you *behave*. Along with Gandalf, Aragorn is one of the focal points of resistance against Sauron. He may be a bit reluctant to take the throne, but his attitude to the conflict of Good vs. Evil can hardly be called "neutral" on that basis. As one of the leaders of the forces of Good, I have no difficulty calling him "Good" with respect to alignment.

I think alignment refinement is going to be slightly more difficult than what any would lead us to believe. The concepts of alignment are nebulous and subjective. We just can't fit everyone perfectly into a 9-part diagram of poorly defined scope and spectrum. Even if we could, it is not too difficult to comprehend that people drift in and out of alignments depending on environment and situation. For example, have you been following the usually conservative posts here at gamegrene recently? Everybody say THANK YOU OLLY!!!

You've hit the nail on the head, Shark (about alignment).
As for the historical examples, Alexander the Great would have started as neutral evil, and slowly become more chaotic as he became more paranoid. He was a monster, not the glorified legend he is seen as today.

I too find it refreshing and have already thanked Olly, you and Mystic Assassin for your levity.

That aside, I think nothing prevents you from making alignment reactive to how the player behaves. Eversince the first edition of Dragonlance Adventures up to Book of Hallowed Might, systems have been coming up with ways to reprensent that.

Why shouldn't someone change alignement? I mean it makes for great roleplaying.

Example: we were playing rod of sevent parts. I played a Chaotic Good 1/2 Ogre who was both a barbarian and a cleric of Lathander. After battling Spiderfiends and going a bit over the edge while raging, he killed his best friend a monk of Lathander.
Because of the trauma I decided he would react very strongly. He destroyed his berzerker sword, became a ranger dedicated to fighting spiderfiends and gradually moved away from chaos.
And it cost me 20% XP for 2 levels to catch up with my barbarian.
Also, the monk having been resurected started comenting on my changing behaviour, on how she was affraid she was loosing her childhood friend etc.

All in all very nice and made easier because the alignment system gave me a BASELINE with which to work. That's all it is really a baseline for role playing.

I have a problem with rules that have a requisite alignment for specific magic weapon usage. I understand the concept when the situation in question contains alignment extremes, such as Lawful Good items harming Chaotic Evil creatures attempting to use said items. But what about less defined alignment jumps such as from Chaotic Good, to True Neutral? Or what about the Chaotic Deity, whose Lawful Paladin has requested a divine weapon? You end up with a sword of Lord (insert bad god here) trying to be used by Sir/Lady (insert scary name here), and it doesn't seem correct. Also, should Chaotic deities have paladins? As for non-magical campaigns, should alignments have any ramifications beyond character motive and background?

Yo Sam, you would fit right in at our gaming table! I'd rather lose class levels than to ruin a character’s natural emotional progression. We know that's a part of learning that's as important as any other is. In recognition of that, we award XP for sacrificial role-playing decisions (this is a big help in swallowing the tremendous penalties incurred while 'going it truthfully'). We know when our fellow gamers are biting the bullet to do it right!

Thank you all for your praise of me. I am most greatful. I want to thank God, I want to thank my parents, David Blaine, Mr. T, I want to thank everybody in the Diff'rent Strokes, even the white guy, I want to thank Lenny Henry (OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOKKKKKKK!), and I wanna thank Dr. Trueman, outta Eastenders, and even his no good brother. Thank you all, cha'mone bruthas! Good night!

1. I WOULD call Batman nuetral, because, though he is not evil by any stretch of the imagination, a lot of his methods are not exactly 'good' are they? Kicking a bloke into a vat of acid so that his face becomes scarred into a hideous, permanent grin? Not very nice, really is it? I don't care if he did shoot your parents, you can't just scar a bloke for life... It's just not cricket.

2. In the wilderness, there is no right or wrong, they're only survival. So, therefore, in game terms, nuetrality.

In most situations, chaotic deities can't have lawful clerics or paladins. The only exceptions I've seen is in the Forgotten Realms: Sune, CG goddess of love has paladins. The general rule is one step away on an alignment table.

And to Olly: I don't really want to get into the Batman argument, but the wilderness thing isn't making a whole lot of sense to me.

For one thing, Nature isn't particularly chaotic either. Things just tend to happen the way they're supposed to unless someone messes with them. Also, mere survival isn't supposed to "declare" one's alignment to the world in general anyway. It's how one acts and reacts toward various situations that "determines" alignment. You're argument shows why animals and other natural forces are neutral, but there is more to people than survival. They make choices in addition to "What am I going to eat today" and "Where am I going to sleep tonight."

I say that Aragorn was Good throughout the series, but I'll concede that he may have made a transition from a chaotic stance to a more lawful stance. I don't know how extreme the starting and ending states might have been, but I don't think he was ever neutral towards Good vs. Evil.

Evidence for this: When he met the Hobbits at the inn, he helped them escape the Nazgul and guided them to other (obviously) good people. He didn't try to take the ring for himself (as a side note, I would say that Boromir failed a Will save), nor did he ever exploit anyone for his own personal gain.

Now I've realized I'm rambling, so I'll stop. That should be enough to get a response anyway.

"Oh, and Cocytus, or whatever you're calling yourself, you are WRONG!"

You go on tellin' yourself that, mister.

"1. I WOULD call Batman nuetral"

You're the first person I've met try to make that argument. Batman's career shows a legitimate concern for others, which is one of the defining characteristics of "good" in the D&D alignment system.

"...because, though he is not evil by any stretch of the imagination, a lot of his methods are not exactly 'good' are they? Kicking a bloke into a vat of acid so that his face becomes scarred into a hideous, permanent grin? Not very nice, really is it?"

You seem to need a refresher on your Batman lore. In nearly every version of that story, the joker's falling into the vat was purely accidental.

While it's true that some later portrayals of Batman make him seem more of a vigilante than a costumed hero, it's important to remember that those portrayals don't comprise the entire canon of Batman comics and film. Batman changed a hell of a lot from decade to decade, especially before the '80s, and each generation made him its own in its own way.

And once again, you've listed one example - which is inaccurate anyway - in support of your claim that Batman uses methods that are not 'good'. I'd say you're confused about the difference between Good and Evil on one axis and Law and Chaos on another. Batman surely doesn't work within the LAW all the time (which speaks to me of a chaotic nature), but he uses non-lethal methods to achieve his goals. He's not above intimidating people to gain a psychological edge, but he DOES NOT kill, and he certainly does not engage in torture. If he were neutral, he wouldn't necessarily have a compunction about killing wrongdoers - check the rules if you don't believe me.

"In the wilderness, there is no right or wrong, they're only survival. So, therefore, in game terms, nuetrality."

The wilderness itself is neutral. The game system is with you there. But how does that make anyone surviving in the wilderness neutral? It doesn't. If wilderness-survival-types - ie, RANGERS - all had to be neutral, the rules would say so. But they've never said so. In 1st ed, rangers had to be good, not neutral. Know why? Because the ranger class was based on Aragorn! Now, in 3d Ed and 3.5, rangers can be of any alignment.

I just thought I'd add my own culturally colourfull expressions into the frey.

RE: Batman, actually he is quite different from author to author. One thing is for sure he is very close to neutrality except for that sissy portrayal in the 70's by Adam West (not his fault, the producers').

Fighting evil and for the common good doesn't necessarily make you good. Check Wolverine, Captain Nemo, Anakin Skywalker, Lestat. All of them have moments of selflessness, but those on the recieving end of their claws/sabers/torpedoes and what not aren't too quick to call them good guys.

After Frank Miller's _Dark Knight Returns_, I've found a lot of sameness in the portrayals of Batman, relative to the huge differences from generation to generation prior to the eighties.

"One thing is for sure he is very close to neutrality except for that sissy portrayal in the 70's by Adam West (not his fault, the producers')."

Adam West played Batman in the '60s. And if you think *that* Batman was a sissy, check out the one from the '40s. Weird!

But I don't see where you're getting the "neutral" thing. Any moral ambiguities in Batman's character were added after Frank Miller, whose interpretation is hardly definitive.

"Fighting evil and for the common good doesn't necessarily make you good. Check Wolverine, Captain Nemo, Anakin Skywalker, Lestat."

Fighting evil doesn't necessarily make you good, but fighting for the common good does. And your examples...would be nice if any of them resembled Batman morally. They don't. (According to the majority of authors) Batman doesn't kill, Sam! That introduces a vast moral gulf between him and the likes of Wolverine.

And you mentioned Lestat, which means I get to make fun of you forevermore. Let me know when you're tired of being Quebecois and are ready to join the other Lestat wannabes in New Orleans. :D

Nemo is a TERRIBLE example! He doesn't fight evil at all, and kills hordes of "innocents"! I'm not counting the _League of Extraordinary Gentlemen_, obviously. In the Verne, Nemo is a misanthrope of the first order. He and Batman have nothing in common whatsoever.

Belphanior has claimed it as more of a result of pre-game chracter development.

Maybe alignments shouldn't be static.

In one of the newer Star Wars games, every action your character takes affects his force alignment. Maybe alignment changing throughout the game and effecting how certain magic/artifacts/techniques work would be iteresting. Of course, this would mean alot of math and devising a new system, which seems like far too much trouble to me.

Here's a better idea: blow the whole alignment thing to hell and have each character have a reputation based on his/her/its behavior.

And as for the whole batman thing: c'mon y'all, this is just plain weird.

Shut your stupid, flat head, Cocytus, if Sam wants to put on black lipstick and quote Ann Rice until the cows come home that's his business. It certainly beats the stuffing out of talking about just how Batman was *actually* a tights-wearin' sissy who enjoyed the company of kittens and male models or some other such ludicrous thing. And your whole Capt. Nemo thing is ludicrous, Nemo is quite clearly one of the good guys, whether it's in Jules Verne's work or in LXG...

Oh, and whilst we're on the subject of LXG, was I the only one that thought, in the movie, Dorian Gray's weapon changed like the weather? Look at him once, what's he fighting with? A walking cane? Look at him again, what's he fighting with? A rapier? Did you see him switch weapons? No! I didn't! And another thing, if he never ages, why did he need to pluck his eyebrows in that one scene, huh? If he doesn't age, then he doesn't grow, therefore his eyebrows do not grow, therefore, I have spotted a vital mistake in the movie, if not Mr. Townsend's stage business, and thus, I feel I am to be somehow ingratiated...

(Eastend Cockney accent) Oi! Allan Moore! You toilet! Sort it aht!

P.S. Oh, and I am fully aware that somebody will misguidedly attempt to correct me, and say that Allan Moore had nothing to do with the movie, and I apologise for my ignorance on the matter, but I do not know who the director was, and so, I direct my Eastenders Cockney fury towards Mr. Allan Moore, instead. All right?

P.P.S. He was good in that film, though, wasn't he, Mr. Stuart Townsend... He stole the show as far as I'm concerned.

"And your whole Capt. Nemo thing is ludicrous, Nemo is quite clearly one of the good guys, whether it's in Jules Verne's work or in LXG..."

What's ludicrous, mate, is to pretend that LXG's portrayal of Nemo had any relation to the Verne. Don't get me wrong; I liked the movie, and I liked the movie's Nemo a great deal. But he's nothing like the cold-blooded Captain from the book.

"...was I the only one that thought, in the movie, Dorian Gray's weapon changed like the weather? Look at him once, what's he fighting with? A walking cane? Look at him again, what's he fighting with? A rapier?"

I thought he had a sword cane.

"If he doesn't age, then he doesn't grow, therefore his eyebrows do not grow..."

Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.

"...therefore, I have spotted a vital mistake in the movie, if not Mr. Townsend's stage business..."

There are loads of 'mistakes' in the movie: for example, if Mina is a vampire, what the hell is she doing sunning herself in broad daylight on the conning tower of the Nautilus? It's silly. But this is the kind of movie you turn your brain off to watch - like the Matrix. If you sit around trying to analyze it, you're just going to ruin the fun it offers.

"...and thus, I feel I am to be somehow ingratiated..."

Your sort always do. Very well: all praise be to you, O great Olly. You are truly an alliaphagic quakebuttock. Or something.

"...but I do not know who the director was, and so, I direct my Eastenders Cockney fury towards Mr. Allan Moore, instead. All right?"

*spits tobacco juice* Just for your edification, pardner, the director was Stephen Norrington of _Blade_ fame. Now you know in which direction to toss all yer rotten tomaters, I reckon.

"P.P.S. He was good in that film, though, wasn't he, Mr. Stuart Townsend... He stole the show as far as I'm concerned."

I thought so, too. But I'm still glad he pitched a fit and quit the set of Lord of the Rings. In my opinion, Viggo makes a much better Aragorn.

(1) I stand by my original statement that Aragorn is L/G. First there is no doubt he is good. If anyone doubts it they are a cabbage brain. Secondly I would argue that he is Lawful to an extreme. Some of you have argued against this, citing his unwillingness to accept responsibility for becoming the king. Also you have suggested that his wandering lifestyle and the descrption of him as a queer wild man by an innkeeper in Bree are adequate reasons for doubting his Lawful credentials. Please allow me to retort. If you read your Tolkien carefuly you will realise that the line of Aragorn lived in thew north INTENTIONALLY. Not because they shunned their duty but because they considered their duty to keep the North free from Evil. They stuck to that duty Lawfully for centuries. Its true that there was a secret element to their service. I speculate that they thought that to bring the kingship back into existence too soonwould cause civil war in Gondor, but we know for example that the people of Bree thought of the Rangers as mere wanderers, that Aragorn fought secretly with the forces of Rohan and Gondor at various times. The film implies that he was short on self belief but the book just does not support this.. Also, Aragorn was not some aimless wanderer. If you read between the lines you will see that he was engaged in a lifetime of dangerous missions often against sauron. The lord of the rings mentions that he visited the dungeons of sauron, that he scouted out the Bordors of Mordor, and searched for Gollum and also undertook secret missions for Gandalf.

(2) batman I would put as N/G. Its true that in his earlier incarnations he was more lawful, working closely with police, but overall he has clearly demonstrated a willinness to operate outside conventional restraints. As to whether he's good or not. Yeah he's good. If he isn't then your definition of good is limited to pacifists.

(3) Nemo is the most difficult one to place. I can't call him chaotic because he had a highly organised dream and commanded a city under the sea. He was clearly for organisation. On the otherhand he had no problem ignoring international law. Call him neutral then.
On the good evil axis He had noble intentions but flawed by personal hubris and a callous disregard for human life. I can't call him good but I accept he had high ideals. therefore N/N. If you think about it he was a kind of druid. He opposed the exploitation of man and nature by man. And he was willing to kill ruthlessly in this cause.

Doh! I've just been bated. And while I'm at it, it was a lucky fin, I'll have you know Mister Assassin! : b

And Cocytus: Here in Quebec all anglophones are Anglais, whether they be from Canada, the US, the UK, Down Under or whatever.

And Lestat could be conceived as good (though I wouldn't argue too long on that.)

Nemo (the Vernes character) was probably like a fanatic druid of the sea, as Mo said.

Batman doesn't kill so he isn't evil that's for sure. But he only fights evil, he doesn't actually do good. That is why he is a dark hero, much less dark than Wolverine or Spawn I'll grant you that but not as "good" as superman, spiderman or the Fantastic Four.

What's wrong with liking some of Ann Rice's work? You don't have to be a goth, Vampire Wannabee to like it you know (not that they are such bad people, just too weird for my taste).

"And Cocytus: Here in Quebec all anglophones are Anglais, whether they be from Canada, the US, the UK, Down Under or whatever."

Oh, I know it. Something similar is true for many of the Brits, Aussies, and New Zealanders I've known: to them, all Americans are "yanks". I once had to intervene in a conversation between an Australian friend of mine and a local Texas fellow who had taken great offense at being called a "Yankee." It's all the same to me, though - I was just pretending offense at being lumped in the same category with Olly.

"Batman doesn't kill so he isn't evil that's for sure. But he only fights evil, he doesn't actually do good."

I disagree, but since I've beaten the topic to death I'll let it go.

"What's wrong with liking some of Ann Rice's work?"

Nothing at all. I was just baiting you.

Mohammed: interesting points about the rangers. I had wanted to call Aragorn N/G or C/G, but you're making me reconsider.

As for your point about Nemo, I can accept a judgment of neutrality. He's hard to pin down, which reinforces my belief that the D&D alignment system really isn't very useful.

What's wrong with being lumped in the same category as me, you lousy Yank! :-)

Sorry, I just wanted to say that. Thanks for clearing up the whole LXG/Dorian Gray issue for me, but I've never heard of a sword cane before (From what I saw in the film, they are indeed groovy, and I would love to know if anybody has created D&D rules for one, yet...). But what's all this about Stuart Townsend having a fit on set of Lord Of The Rings? An actual fit? My mild-mannered Oirish, identical twin brother? Doesn't seem like him...

Also, before I forget, I do feel that you were insulting my intelligence somewhat by calling me an alliaphagic quakebuttock. My knowledge of ancient insults is godlike, thou oleaginous lobscouse, so attempting to baffle me with the English language is futile at best! :-)

Mo, I could stand here and argue with you about rangers and Aragorn, and perhaps I will, but I fear I will have to get another glass of milk.

P.S. My resemblance to Mr. Stuart Townsend is frightening and uncanny. Young women find me irrisistable, especially when I do that whole bullet-wounds healing up trick. They love that!

P.P.S. Ass, you're comment about Finding Nemo are appreciated, because if you hadn't have made that joke, someone would have, and I'm just glad it happened sooner rather than later.

"...but I've never heard of a sword cane before (From what I saw in the film, they are indeed groovy, and I would love to know if anybody has created D&D rules for one, yet...)"

Not to my knowledge, but there were rules for them in the old TOP SECRET spy role-playing game published by TSR (what kind of spy wouldn't love a sword cane?).

Sword canes are curiously common here in the US, or they used to be. That's not "common" as in "something you see everyday," but "common" as in "more common than they have a right to be." My grandfather, a native of Virginia until his death, owned several. They were for show, one hopes, but I always thought they were damned spiffy when I was a lad.

"But what's all this about Stuart Townsend having a fit on set of Lord Of The Rings? An actual fit?"

From what I heard, Townsend was initially cast as Aragorn. I seem to recall reading somewhere that He left the production over "creative differences" with Peter Jackson - serendipitously for the better, I think.

"...thou oleaginous lobscouse..."

Why, ye thrawn, ill-feckit gaberlunzie...wait, that's just anger talking. ;) Is there such a thing as non-oleaginous lobscouse, I wonder?

Hah! Krom laughs at your four winds! Mr. Townsend left the project because it was deemed that he was just too young to play the role of Aragorn. After which, he took up the alias "Olly" and began posting here, at Gamegrene.

I'll tell everyone why (because I know you want me to) the thread keeps returning to Batman, Aragorn, and even Nemo. It is because when we are speaking of character alignment, we refer to easily recognized characters whose motives are complex and intertwined with conflict. We chose characters that are seemingly cartoonish at first glance, yet reveal a plethora (do you even know what a plethora is?) of richly developed emotions and inspirations. It is also pertinent that we refer to characters whose actions are heroic in scale, if not motive. We call this character the haunted hero, one whose motives and history are clouded or polluted. Often, the haunted hero attempts that which we would WANT to do, but that we, the readers/listeners/viewers, often do not, or cannot accomplish. This is not to be confused with what we SHOULD do, even if the two actions are one and the same.

Of course, '80s movie producers knew this was an area rich for exploitation during the cold war era. They gave us heroes of such twisted and violent temperament that we became accustomed to the bloodshed fare of the period. John Rambo, Dutch, Frank Castle a.k.a. the Punisher, McCloud, Conan, Mad Max, Casey Ryback, Oprah, were the heroes du' jour, to name a few. However, they are not new concepts to us. Merely shelved for a period following WWII. The masters of the past penned characters that were the predecessors of the modern haunted hero. Hamlet, Odysseus, Moses (not fictional btw), and Sir Lancelot.

As a culture, we have used these characters to help define a sense of morality that is both foreign and familiar to us. I can best describe this as a sense of outrage, with which we sympathize, plus the ability to respond by any means, with which we desire. The haunted hero is SO very close to what is plausibly human, and it is the character with which we most easily identify. Aragorn, Batman, and Neo are today's versions of that concept. It is reasonable that they become the subjects of our alignment discussion.

Oh no, they're onto me! It's true, I was outraged at being considered 'too young' by that fat, old, bearded kiwi. I would have made a spiffing Aragorn. Ah well, but at least I got to shag Arwen Evenstar whilst I was there, eh?

Thats why I go for the older kind of hero, more noble, grounded in decency and fair play, violent only if absolutely necessary.

I reject modern ideas of morality. THEY ARE VIRTUALLY indistinguishable from evil. Thats what comes of believing the lies of politicians. As Tolkien says in his preface of 'Lord of the Rings', and I para phrase:

'This book is not an allegory on the second world war. If it was then the allies would have used the ring as soon as they got it, Saruman would have developed his own ring, and both sides would have despised the hobbits. They would not have survived long, even as slaves.'

Maybe I'm just being too Christian for my own good here, but morality is a ridiculous word these days. It's actually more the fault of relativism and not politics...although they have indeed worsened the situation.....

I am beginning to think alignment is a rather stupid concept now...people are just too complex to be described in two adjectives, especially when you're trying to describe their morality.

Moses was a haunted hero, huh? Nah, he was more or less taking orders, at least from a Judeo-Christian viewpoint.

In the real world, good and evil, like unicorns, trolls, elves and dwarves, do not exist. Nobody is truly good and nobody is truly evil.

A mass-murderer might be considered 'evil' by the media, or labelled it by the newspapers, but nine times out of ten, if you read his lifestory, it's a pretty tragic one. He's likely to be from a poor background, likely with abusive parents, and, often never had a girlfriend/boyfriend.

Society creates that which could be called 'evil', unintentionally, when it isolates people. Nobody is born evil, and if you believe the Catholics, nobody is born good either.

Now we're actually getting down to what makes people tick. Theres no reason why you can't incorporate some of these ideas into your campaign. When you describe an npc, you can go into his background and motivation if he's sufficiently important to the campaign.

The standard alignment system is an excellent shorthand tool, however. I think its worth keeping to come up with a quick idea of what an individual would do in any circumstance.

At the same time, I think that Player Characters should not be slavishly constrained by alignment. Of course if they consistently act out of alignment, the DM can change it for them.

Now, to go out of game mode for a second, theo and olly, morality, good, evil, religion are not meaningless concepts. They are a model we put on the world for practical reasons. Like any other model, they are approximations to the truth (some better than others), but we use them because they help to put a framework on the real world so we can operate in it.

The real question is, where do you stand ? Is your basic motivation one of compassion or one of self interest. This will have more influence on your actions than the framework you use to look at reality.

Thank you, Mo, for your interest in my post. However, I wish to add something to it.

Demons are ALWAYS evil in my campaign, because they are creatures created to fulfill the duties of darkness. They are incapable of doing good, behaving in a merciful manner or creating beautiful things for noble purposes. They can, however, be redeemed, though most of them simply refuse to...

Celestials (or angels, as they are known in my campaign) are ALWAYS good, created to perform the duties of light. They are kind, benevolent and loving, never acting malevolently or in a cruel manner, and incapable of creating things of evil and ugliness. However, they can fall to evil, though, and some of the Nine Hells most powerful agents once served under the benevolent gods. However, most angels shun this vocation, and are fierce in their opposition of their fallen brethren...

If the Bible teaches us anything, it is that good and evil, innocence and guilt, law and chaos are simply different sides of the same coin. I like this idea, and tried to incorporate it into my campaign setting.

You see what I mean about models of the world. The dogma of your world is that Demoms are always evil and Celestials always good, but this is clearly not so if some demons have turned to good and some celestials to evil.

A more sophisticated model would be that Demons tend towards evil and celestials towards good, but individuals can vary their nature.

However the dogma of your campaign dislikes this encroachment on its black and white perspective, and it invents a dramatic, possibly divinely ordained intervention, such as a Redemption, or a Fall in order to patch over the faults in logic.

Finally, I think that the bible, and Judeo Christian Islamic texts do not equate good, evil, law , and chaos. They clearly express a preference for good actions over bad, and a tendency to promote law. I think that its more like far eastern religions, bhuddism, taoism and Hinduism that show life as a sort of cycle where good folows evil etc. I come back to my point that these are only different models of the truth. Whats more important is, where do you stand ? Is your basic motivation one of compassion or one of self interest.

I'm not sure that the rule of "actions determine alignment" should be applied to outsiders. Maybe I'm just being a bit loony, but it might help thinking that celestials are "goodness" elementals and devils and demons are "lawful evil" elementals and "chaotic evil" elementals. No one complaigns that a fire elemental should be able to choose whether it likes to live in hot or cold places because it makes sense that ALL fire elementals like heat. I think we can extend this analogy to include celestials and infernals to liking good and evil.

I suppose also, the actions of said entities could reflect negativly on their behalf, yet serve a greater good in the end...or evil, depending on which entity.

A demon could possess a man and use his body for its own selfish motivations (kill a king, priestess, etc.) or a more subtle demon could persuade the same man with promises of riches or power. Or to a greater extent, make the man believe this heinous task is actually the NOBLE thing to do. In the demon's defense, its target may be a threat to mankind itself, and the demon's wish is to maintain peace, or eliminate assimilation of global powers, or whatever...and...

*looks up at the long-ass paragraph*

DAMN! Where the hell'd I come up with all THAT? I've had too much turkey today...

I apologise for the lax word use in my earlier post. Almost all demons are evil, and almost all angels are good. They can be redeemed or fall, but most choose not to.

And, as for 'faults in my logic', Mo, I shall ask you politely, to shove them up your ass. Religion in my campaign world is based on religion in Medieval Europe. It was a time of utter piety, and devotion to the gods, not only because of love of their gods, but because they feared them so. This was because of inquisitors, witch hunters and their ilk, using religion to their advantage. You can't argue with history, sunshine. 'Faults in my logic' indeed!

I disagree. People have been decrying the "lapse in modern morality" since the decline of the Roman Empire, when (coincidentally?) "mystery cults" like Christianity had begun to supplant the dignified old state religion...since an obscure tribe of bedouins wandered around Sinai bemoaning the popularity of the neighbors' god Baal...since the Epic of Gilgamesh, for all love. Saying that modern folk have no sense of morality is nothing new; as far as I can tell, it's a sentiment nearly as old as language itself.

Just because one doesn't share morals carved in stone by divine agencies or ancient tribesmen doesn't mean that one doesn't have morals. If one says that some morals are relative to certain situations, that doesn't necessarily mean that one has no sense of moral boundaries whatsoever. Some religious and politically-motivated commentators might have an interest in making their enemies appear that way, but it's usually just a combination of ignorance and willful prevarication.

Religious folk do NOT have any sort of monopoly on morality. In my admittedly limited experience, the average atheist is as often as not as moral as the average churchgoer, and sometimes moreso.

My problem with alignment is not that I don't believe in good and evil; my problem is that I've never met a person who was wholly one or the other. To stereotype someone as good or evil just makes no sense to me.

I do agree with Ashagua that where outsiders are concerned, blanket alignment stereotypes make sense. In the game worlds many of us use, I see Celestials and Demons as the embodiments of moral (or immoral) principle. They aren't given choices as mortals are; they are made to personify a certain moral point of view.

Olly said:

"And, as for 'faults in my logic', Mo, I shall ask you politely, to shove them up your ass."

*spits tobacco*

Pardner, there're so many faults in yer logic that I doubt Mo's rectum could contain 'em all. I doubt even yers could, while we're talkin' about it. But I brought this here box of lawn and leaf bags, and we'll see if we can't fit 'em in these. It *is* heavy trash day 'round here.

Cocytus said: "My problem with alignment is not that I don't believe in good and evil; my problem is that I've never met a person who was wholly one or the other. To stereotype someone as good or evil just makes no sense to me."

Well, no one is wholly anything. That's part of being a free-willed person. You get the opportunity to mess up. Saying someone is "good" or "evil" is probably an average of all past actions that one has taken.
...I was going to give an example, but I realized that wasn't needed.

So, I'll discuss something else.

Religiosity doesn't equal morality. Though one heavily influences the other.

The biggest problem with this kind of discussion is the differing theologies between the real world and the game worlds. For example, no one on Faerûn debates about whether the various gods exist or not (the Time of Troubles probably has something to do with that), but the validity of the idea of religion is debated over and over again here on Earth.

...I'm trying to figure out how to express my conclusion to this, but it's not working. If anyone knows what I'm saying, please let me know.

I'm not saying that individuals are neither good nor evil. I'm saying that they aren't monolithic in their goodness/evilness. Of course, this leaves room for some people to be neutral in this regard. It all depends on the way they would usually act and react in various situations.

No, I have never been a philosophy student. But my dad is a Southern Baptist preacher, so that probably counts for something.

Ashaqua, I am intrigued by the idea that your dad is a Southern Baptist preacher. Is he one of those rowdy, shouty 'Praise The Lord!' types? What does he think of D&D?

I apologise for misinterpreting your post, but you make a good comment in your last one, about nobody being absolutely evil or good, over all, and thus, I always make sure my villains have some good points, and my villains have some bad points.

For example; one of my villains is a sinister character called Coin (NOT pronounced 'Coin!' rather, his name is pronounced 'Co-in') who is a necrophiliac, who believes he can only be truly happy and respected in a world of the dead. He travels in hideous mockery of a royal precession, sitting on a throne, held up by zombies. He is accompanied by a patrol of undead bodyguards, two ghoul lackeys who do his bidding, and a harem of zombie women whom... he has his... pleasure with... Ahem. In our group's last adventure, he infected a water source with a plague which turned all who drank it into undead (ala Warcraft III. Ah, plagiarism!) He's quite, quite mad, and as disgusting and evil as they come, but he does have some good points. For example; he genuinely cares about his undead zombie harem, becoming enraged when they are threatened and/or killed. Though he fights through trickery and overwhelming odds, and thus, seems rather cowardly and dishonourable, he's actually rather brave when he needs to be, leaping from his throne, throwing fireballs (shaped like flaming skulls, no less) around.

Likewise, if one looks in the Player Handbook, it reads that 'Tordek is good, but he's also greedy too. He's not afraid to steal what he wants if he can justify it to himself, and he thinks he can get away with it.'

I think it's interesting, flawed characters (as well as evil characters with 'redeeming' features) that make the game interesting.

Only the most anally retentive person can stick to ALL his or her principles ALL the time.

Do you know why our principles need to be somewhat relative? Because of the limitations of language. What?

Yep, language. Language is what one builds his or her thoughts with. Since no language is all encompassing, words sometimes fail to express the exact nature of one's belief system.

For example, I can say that stealing is usually wrong. But for me stealing actually means unjustly taking something that doesn't belong to you.
And what is unjust? I have a dozen or so examples in my head, but there are probably some situations I haven't considered yet. So I'll need to redefine what I mean by that as I come accross new situations.

Interestingly enough, my dad played D&D while he was in seminary. Hmm..."rowdy" doesn't really seem to fit him. He's definitely got firm stances on various issues (and I agree with a lot of them), and he tells what he thinks is right, but I've always seen him do it in a respectful manner. Which is unlike the stereotypes that are usually portrayed.

So I'm going to disagree with Sam and say there's another option:
d) use a moral system that was defined by an all-knowing, all-powerful God. After all, if He made everything, He should know what's going on.

Its all well and good to say that you are going to use a moral system defined by an all knowing and all powerful god. But how are you going to know what it is?

Trying to figure out what that moral system says puts you right back where you were in the beginning. Christianity, to use it as an example, tries to find that moral system from the bible. But, if you look at how the bible has been used through out the centuries, you'll pretty quickly come to the conclusion that the bible is relative.

*sigh* I was afraid something like this would start. Good thing it's almost on topic. If anyone wants us to stop using this space for this particular discussion, I'm willing to switch to email. But until then:

*trudges up to debating podium*
I don't see the Bible as relative to anything. Cadfan, you're going to have to show some specific examples for me to see what you're talking about.

Also, I think it's a mistake for anyone to assume that Christianity defines itself. Rather, it is God who inspired people to write down words, which dictated a plan for humans to be bought back from their sinful state, which we call Christianity.

Because God values our ability to say "No" to Him (therefore making "Yes" that much better), there is the opportunity for people to make mistakes and abuse basically anything. That's where heresies come from. Since I'm taking this viewpoint, I can easily say that the way people use the Bible in no way makes the Bible itself relative.

It's really easy to twist the Scriptures to say something you want it to say: just take something out of context, maybe do a tiny bit of creative editing, and you've got something that sounds like the truth. But it isn't.

The easiest example is slavery. Was acceptable in the old testament, and the bible was used to justify slavery until around the 1800s. Different parts of the world stopped doing that at different times, but that was basically when it all went down.

A less emotionally charged example would be working on sunday. Just a couple of decades ago it was taboo. Now its common place. Our economy wouldn't function so well if we didn't at least have gas stations and grocery stores and police working on sunday.

Again, its all well and good to say that the bible is not relative, and that people just got it wrong. But what makes you think that YOU are ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN to have it right, when ALL THOSE PEOPLE had it wrong? To put it another way, they were absolutely certain they were right. You are absolutely certain you are right. It'd be crazy for you not to concede that there's really no way for you to tell what god's true point of view on working on sunday is. But, you still have an opinion. Hence, that opinion is relative to your point of view.

Ashaqua, claiming refuge in the divinely-inspired Word does not make one's moral standpoint absolute. Since several other religions are doing the same thing with wildly different conclusions, it merely makes one's standpoint relative to one's own religion.

Cadfan's made some good points about this Book, this moral absolute of yours, and there are more to be made. Suffice to say: if the Book itself were absolute, there'd never have been any schism in the church. But the redeemed can't seem to agree on how to interpret it: once again, each sect claims a monopoly on absolutes that are in fact merely relative to that particular sect.

I could go on and on with you about religion in specific and Christianity in particular. They are favorite subjects of mine. But Cadfan's right - we're gonna have to let it go, or else continue the discussion via private e-mail.

In an attempt to steer the topic back on track, how absolutely should a DM enforce alignment? How much margin of error is there before the 'general alignment tendency' necessitates a shift in a character's alignment?

Personally, I've banned alignment. Totally. I encourage the players to work out personal values and beliefs for their characters, but after I saw how much stupidity and abuse grows from the paladin's "detect evil" ability, and how difficult it is to run a campaign where the bad guys are hidden and treacherous, I just plain threw it out.

Originally, I threw it out only for sentient humanoids, but it eventually had to go for everything.

It encouraged role playing stereotypes, and it gave the party a magical "bad guy radar." Neither was good for the game.

While I do have things that I could say in a rebuttal, I too think the best idea is to drop that particular subject.

In the last D&D session, a paladin joined the party and was constantly using "Detect Evil". It would have been too powerful if there were important evil figures about, but as it was, there were only zombies. It also didn't help that the DM didn't fully understand how it worked. He has since rectified that mistake. "Detect Evil" will be a lot less useful for him because we are in a capital city, where there are plenty of evil people around. We are also trying to get this particular player to be more of a roleplayer instead of a rollplayer.

Ashaqua,
My current game is not using D&D, so it is no longer an issue, but back in the day, I just changed detect evil to be less annoying. Cast on a person (or any sentient being with free will), it does nothing since the person is not inherently evil, but possesses free will and can be either good or evil at any given moment. If the person is currently engaged in an act of stunning evil, then something might register.

Detect evil, in my old games, would let you sniff out a vampire disquised as a farmer, but not pick out the farmer harboring evil thoughts from among his neighbors. Detect evil would still work on non-sentients, evil creatures without free will - those truly evil by nature, or items, or magic auras and whatnot, just not on people.

That's my 2 cents on detect evil.

Cocytus,
In terms of strict alignment enforcement in D&D, if you are a cleric or paladin, you need to stay pretty much in scope. If you are a non-religious character then you really have to go out of your way for me to punish you. My thinking is that as a regular guy, as long as you pay your tithe, your church (and the god it serves) is unlikely to ostracise or punish you for minor violations of creed.
If it turns out that a character develops in a manner that the player did not originally predict, and an alignment change seems in order, I would approach the player, and make it part of the story - wrenching moral choices and a rethinking of deeply held world views and all that. Though i have to admit, that last part is just theory, I never had it happen when I was GMing.

As a player, my CG fighter is exploring a dungeon during an interplanar cataclysm, when he unexpectedly encountered a slightly disoriented blue dragon, and since I had the drop on him I jumped in and unloaded with both barrels (figuratively speaking). Unbeknownst to me the cataclysm had disoriented the dragon in such a way as to change his alignment to good- so my DM penalized me for attacking a good creature - alignment change, level loss, the whole bit. I thought it was a bit extreme, but he was a by-the-book DM, plus it gave me the chance to go on a quest to redeem myself, and return to CG (though I did not get the levels back as a result of the quest, I earned them back the hard way).

Different GM styles is all.

Finally, and a little off topic, I wanted to thank you both, and Cadfan, for having the good taste to not engage in a religious flame war on this site. It was very considerate of you all.

As for level loss, etc, that's no longer a problem in 3d ed. changing alignments incurs no real penalty for about half the character classes - the others may or may not suffer, depending on the nature of the change.

I hate the detect evil spell, also. Therefore, in my campaign, it only works on outsiders, who are usually obviously evil or obviously good, anyway, and it does not your average man on the street, who is neither good nor evil.

I hate the detect evil spell, also. Therefore, in my campaign, it only works on outsiders, who are usually obviously evil or obviously good, anyway, and it does not your average man on the street, who is neither good nor evil.

Mr. A is a human level-0 commoner. He donates a lot of money to charity, but at the same time is jealous of his neighbour, Mr. X (formerly Malcolm!), and plots to outdo him at every opportunity. Detect evil does not work on him.

Mr. B is a hostile, level-0 pit fiend. He enjoys torturing the innocent, and killing for the sake of it. He is capable of doing good, if he wants to, but he is extremely reluctant to do so. Detect evil works on him.

My employers have been cracking the whiprecently so I've been out of action. I have some quick points to make:

(1) Olly I'm shocked. 'Shove it up my ass' indeed! I wasn't even pointing out faults in yer logic, I was saying that the theology in yer campaign was logically unsustainable. Thats fine. Almost all theology is logically unsustainable. I like that. It gives plenty of scope for schism.

(2) This religious debate is exactly on topic. How can we construct a religious model in a campaign without having a quite sophisticated understanding of morality in the real world.

(3) detect evil and incidentally know align and detect lie can all be considered are destabilising spells because they allow characters information that naturally cagey and secretive DMs would like kept secret from them. This naturally leads many DMs to dislike these spells. I am not one of these DMs because I am an enlightened and farsighted individual. I realise that as characters get powerful they naturally gain more resources, and infor mation is just one of them. However, I agree that detect evil should not pick up evil vibes unless its a strong evil. So a petty thief would not give of evil vibes but an evil temple would. This has long been a convention since Gygax's time and works well.

Perhaps you like detection spells because you are enlightened and farsighted. Perhaps, however, you do not run a campaign in which solving mysteries is a large portion of the plot.

When your party has been sent out to a remote village with a population of 500, to solve a series of murders and to find the suspected serial killer, an individual who is likely to have been dabbling in the dark arts, the ability to round up all the townspeople, and detect evil, kind of kills the entire plot.

Detect Evil should not replace moral choice (for more on this, see Memehunter's comments on the 'How Typical is Stereotypical' thread). It should not be an 'evilometer' that allows allegedly 'good' characters to execute people on sight simply because they yield an evil 'ping'. Assuming one allows Detect Evil to work, which I generally do, the mere presence of evil does NOT entitle a Lawful Good person (who must abide by the law, remember) to execute someone on that basis alone. If the character cannot prove that the evil person has committed a capital crime, killing the person would be unlawful. If the character does not have legal enforcement powers (and why should he or she, in many instances?), then killing the person is equally likely to be unlawful. Paladins must observe the law as well as fight for good; if they don't, they're risking their class status.

Moreover, characters who use Detect Evil as an excuse to go on a Dogma-style execution spree may face the displeasure of the local authorities, and may end up facing criminal charges themselves.

In Cadfan's example above, I would offer three solutions:

1) Several individuals in the village detect for evil, but only one has committed the crime. Since one or more of these evil individuals has a position of status in the village, they cannot be arrested or otherwise accused without any evidence.

2) The guilty party as an amulet of Undectable Alignment or similar magic item - which just so happens to be more powerful than the party's means of detection.

3) Not only are there evil folk in the village, but there are traces of an ancient shrine where torture, human sacrifice, and soul-eating once took place on a regular basis. Much of the environs of the village detects evil so strongly that any character using a Detect Evil spell or power will be overwhelmed by it, and will be rendered physically incapacitated for a period of time. When the radar-happy character suffers penalties for several hours after each use of the spell or power, s/he won't be so quick to go pinging everything in sight just to see if it detects evil.

Sorry about that, Mo. I must have misinterpreted you. I didn't mean to cause offence.

Like I say, in my campaign, detect evil and other such spells do not exist. Smite Evil, however, does, because it is a spell granted by the gods, who are by definition, totally good or evil. However, Smite Evil works slightly differently in my campaign, according to the patron god of the cleric casting it...

So, for example, if the cleric follows Scahrossa, half-sister of Ollidammara, goddess of sadism and punishment, then Smite Evil affects rogues and clerics of Ollidammara. If the cleric follows Pelor, god of the sun, Smite Evil works against nocturnal creatures, and cave-dwellers who shun the light of the sun.

It's a little more work, but it makes better sense, I find, after all, all gods have their own agendas, so it would make sense that they would see evil in something others perhaps do not.

Actually, in the campaign where these events took place, it wasn't realistic for me to have several individuals show up for equal amounts of evil. The serial killer was also an amateur summoner, who had regular contact with evil outsiders. The rest of the village was basically a farming community. No potato farmer in the area was going to be able to match that.

Also, the party did not kill him on the spot. They searched his home first for evidence. I was able to drag the mission out a bit longer by making it not so easy to find. (It wasn't in his home, they had to go find it elsewhere.) But still, finding the individual took about 5 seconds.

I know the "undetectable alignment" thing works, but, here's the problem. I want this sort of plot line to be the basis for my campaign. I can't have every single bad guy have an amulet of undetectable alignment. It just wouldn't be realistic.

The third option I could use, one time. Then I would be stuck in the future. I also try to avoid changing rules like that without telling the characters ahead of time. Knowing that your abilities work allows planning, which I like. So, the characters would have to know that this particular area generally has this effect when one uses detect evil. But, still, that's only good for one shot.

Any sort of "quick fix" solution is going to have one of two problems. Either it will be useful only one time, and will feel contrived if used multiple times, or it can be fixed by using ANOTHER detection spell. Detected evil, but can't prove this guy did the deed? There are detection spells that detect falsehood, or which force someone to tell the truth. Now you question him, and THEN you execute. He's got an amulet that conceals his alignment? I hope that amulet also conceals its own magic aura, cause we've got a sorceror with detect magic.

It gets ridiculous after a while, and depending on your campaign type, very disruptive.

As far as items of undetectable alignment go, I figure it stands to reason that institutions such as Thieves' Guilds - and *especially* spies - make a habit of keeping them. In a world where detection magic is commonplace, I have to think that anti-detection magic is equally commonplace. Consider: in our world, we have lie detector tests, drug tests, and radar detectors. That people are able to fool the first is common knowledge, and there are entire industries focused on fooling the other two. I'm not saying that such things should be common (at least, not more common than the spells they guard against), but I am saying that your party shouldn't be shocked to find such things on the bodies of the bad guys after the dust has settled. Bear in mind: for every spell that can detect, there's another that can occlude. There are amulets of undectable thoughts as well as undetectable alignment. If you want to keep secrets, you've got to use these things! They're part of the fantasy setting implicit in D&D.

One key element of what you're saying is that you can't spring these things on your players mid-campaign. I agree. But all is still not lost; there are ways to work in hostile casters, divine interference, and a host of other agencies that are part and parcel of the standard D&D setting. You're not, from my view, mindlessly depriving the players of their powers; you're creating real, in-system challenges that they should expect and be able to work around.

Player character powers should work; again, we agree there. But if the powers are ruining your scenarios, then the tail is wagging the dog. I don't think it's unreasonable to give yourself a little insurance every other bad guy or so to prevent your characters from sailing through the scenario too easily.

I never got the Thieves Guild idea. It sounded so stupid to me. What better way to alert the authorities to the crime problems of the city than to advertise it openly with a guild. The rozzers would just raise an attack force, assault the guild, and arrest anyone inside. They'd be thrown in the prison, and their leader, Richard O'Brien, rubbing his hands together and grinning slyly all the while, would be hung, and go to the great Crystal Maze in the sky, where he can wear fishnets and dance about with Tim Curry singing silly songs for all eternity.

I was the guy who made a plea to allow detect evil spells etc. And I stand by it.

I take your points that various devices to make use of such spells uncertain have their limitations. and that in the adventure you described there was only one evil person. But on the whole, I find your reasoning on this matter unconvincing.

First take Cocytus' argument that just because a guy shows up evil on your spell, its not a licence to kill him. He could still be completely innocent of the alleged crime. Your players should still have a mystery to solve, they just have a starting point at which to begin. And it could be a false lead.

Second, remember the well used convention that only strong evil will show up. Thus a petty murderer may not even qualify despite the heinousness of the crime.

Thirdly, remember that evil is often a matter of perspective. In many circumstances, both parties in a conflict engage in terrible actions which they truly feel are completely justified. Are they evil or good. In such circumstances, I feel that you would be justified as a DM in giving a confused reading to a spell. This might actually be the most normal state of affairs.

Fourthly, there are any number of ways in which a clever individual might confuse a spell. To give just one example, an evil character breaks off a bit of a holy shrine that radiates goodness. Because this guy is TRULY evil, he avoids directly contact with the shrine, but keeps the piece in a small box on his person. This might confuse a reading. I am sure I can come up with half a dozen other tricks with little effort.

Fifthly, People generally don't like spellcasters wandering round town, pointing at them and chanting 'I call upon the holy power of Sanctimonious to reveal the unclean intentions of the evildoers!' It ain't good manners and the party will get the door slammed in their face by all sorts of innocent but pissed off parties.

Sixthly. I think that many DMs like to be mysterious for the sake of it. It gives them a sense of secret power over their players, and whenever I detect such behaviour I let the DM know what I think. Some mystery is fine, but unreasonable levels of it just to satisfy a DMs sense of control is a real turn off.

Let me end on something I truly believe ' I HAVE NEVER FOUND THE SPELLS DETECT EVIL/ALIGNMENT/TRUTH ETC TO DESTABILIZE A CAMPAIGN AS LONG AS THE DM ALLOWED THEIR USE ONLY IN A REASONABLE WAY'

They won't destabilize a campaign if the campaign plot doesn't involve hidden, evil elements. The fact that my campaigns tend to have so much to detect makes the spells not so great for game balance.

Look, just take my scenario. Small town. Scared public. The party is made up of law enforcement individuals from the central capital, and they have been sent out to solve a series of gruesome murders. The killer is likely one of the townspeople, but you don't know which one.

All a party with a paladin has to do is go around and concentrate quietly. This party had a wizard, a cleric, and a paladin, so it was even easier.

The solution of, "Ah, but this particular bad guy has a magical item that negates that ability" is kind of contrived. It might work one or two times, but unless I want to make those items more common than dirt, its going to feel forced and silly. Especially if you don't run a monty haul campaign, where everyone has a magic item or three.

The solution of, "everyone's a little bit evil so the results will be off," would work if the crime we were trying to solve was figuring out who stole someone's silverware. It doesn't work so well when the crime is serial murder and connections with forbidden demonic creatures. Everyone might be a little bit evil, but not THAT evil. As for the idea that a "petty murderer" might not show up, well, maybe you and I have different ideas on the definition of "petty."

The "its not good manners" thing would work if detecting evil required making any noise. I suppose I could rule zero that it does, but it never has before.

The "you still have to prove it" is made difficult by the ease through which other detection spells can help you prove someone's guilt, once you know who they are. Zone of Truth is a level 2 cleric spell. In fact, all of these unbalancing detection spells are of very low level, frequently level zero, or free, if you're a paladin.

I'm going to make this two posts. THe second will be three scenarios in which detection either did, or did not, make a huge difference. You can decide for yourself whether it was a good difference or a bad one.

For all of these, the party is a wizard, a paladin, a cleric, a ranger, and a rogue/fighter heading for duelist. They are between levels 5 and 7, different for each mission. The party lives in a kingdom that is very far flung. There is a central government, but there are also a lot of provinces on the outskirts where control isn't so tight. The kingdom does its best to protect them nevertheless, and so the state church and the government have created an organization which handles this. It is largely made up of paladins, good clerics, and others with similar convictions. The party is one of these groups.

Scenario one.

Pretty much the one I've used above. The party is sent out to solve a series of murders and disappearances. The village they are sent to is isolated. The murders are occurring because one of the townspersons wanted to kill his neighbor, and bought some magical supplies from a recurring bad guy of whom the players were not yet aware. The supplies summoned a creature which did kill the man's neighbor, but then went feral and hid in the woods, where it had been preying upon the townspeople. The PCs are unaware of all of this. In interviewing various townspeople, they become aware that this particular man is up to no good. So what happens now?

Well, fortunately for me, this was very early in our use of 3rd edition, and no one realized until after the mission was over that they could have used detection spells. If they had, it would have been a snap to uncover the guilty party, since summoning evil outsiders to kill your neighbors over a dispute involving someone's wife is, in my opinion, enough to register you as evil. Detect magic would have also worked, as the man had 2 items, one to summon, and one to control the creature and protect himself. He was hanging onto the second one.

My goal was for the party to finish this mission by eliminating the creature, (which involved some problem solving, as it was too big for them to fight head on) figure out that this man was probably guilty of something, and be unable to conclusively do anything about it until later when the recurring bad guy was hinted at/revealed. Detection spells would have meant that it was all revealed immediately, denying the party the mystery of tracking the creature, identifying it, and based on its physical description working out a plan by which they could attack and kill it. They could have just asked some guy for all the answers. It would have been like a cheat sheet. The battle in which the parties drafted the townspeople to scare the creature out of its lair with fire and sound and into an ambush would not have been so cool if the PCs had not figured out all of these tactics by careful scouting.

Same party, etc. Party is doing what is supposed to be routine work patrolling the border, but things begin to go wrong. In the end, what was involved was investigating a plot amongst several of the border lords. One was in alliance with the hostile neighboring kingdom, and was going to sell out his neighbors in exchange for more power, and membership in their kingdom. The other kingdom intended to use their new gains in the PC's kingdom as leverage in a war the had been planning for some time. The baron who had turned traitor had another, less intelligent baron who was acting as his fall guy. The other guy didn't know about the entirety of the plot, and just thought he was working to expand his own lands at the expense of another baron's life. The PCs had to unravel this over the course of two gaming sessions.

Zone of Truth reared its head in this session. The PCs discovered the first bad guy surprisingly quickly, and my larger plot was only saved because 1) they didn't think to ask the right questions, and 2) they only had one zone of truth memorized. They asked the wrong questions because they went to detection spells too fast, and hadn't done the non magical investigation that would have let them in some important clues. I was given a reprieve in which to salvage the mission between sessions. The next session, they came back with several zones of truth, and better questions. Fortunately, I had accounted for this by this point, and was able to provide a decent gaming session anyways, by putting in some non mystery related plot.

Same pcs and everything. Neighboring kingdom is still evil, and still wants to conquer the PCs kingdom. PCs are still trying to stop them. The neighboring kingdom is using the winter as a time for special operations to terrorize and destabilize the PCs kingdom, so that it will not be able to effectively defend itself. At this point, they are trying to assassinate nobles who publically commit to defending the kingdom's lands, in hopes of making it difficult to organize an effective defendign army. There were 3 assassins the PCs were trying to locate. This was the first. This assassin had murdered 2 nobles in their beds so far. The pcs are racing between towns trying to stay ahead of him, and to protect and warn the barons in danger.

Anyways, the PCs know the assassin intends to kill this particular lord at a particular hour. They know this assassin is something impressive, because he's killed men under full guard before. They figure he's either got good magical items, or is a spell caster, or has something of that nature to help him out. They're correct- he's a wererat, which lets him slip in places and through holes in walls that a human could never fit though. This makes the "slide into the baron's bedroom and kill him in his sleep even though there's a guard in the room with him" thing possible.

The pcs aren't dumb. They have 2 paladins. The paladins sit on the ground, and concentrate on detect evil. They "meditate" like this for some time. They actually failed to save the first baron they needed to protect, because they didn't know about the wererat thing, and the assassin slipped in undetected from a direction they were not monitoring. (they were pointed at windows and doors, not what they believed to be impassable walls) With the next baron, they got smart. They detected evil at the walls, and monitored the doors with the other PCs eyes. The assassin had thought up some new tricks, too, (he entered the room through the ceiling, transformed into a human, doused the baron and the baron's bed in burning oil, and fled) but the PCs chased him and got him. That was all well and good.

But the thing was, the problem solving in this mission boiled down to, "how can we most effectively use detect evil." The problem solving in all the missions before either was, or could have easily been, "lets use detect evil and detect magic and zone of truth more effectively."

Not every problem should be solved by that, and I shouldn't have to resort to "cause the DM said so" as a means of limiting these abilities. I find it a much simpler and more elegant solution to limit/ban these abilities than to conjure reasons for how each bad person can't be magically detected by first and zero level spells. I also don't have to work up silly explanations for how some evil traitor cleric managed to work his way into the church hierarchy, when even the level 1 clerics have spells that would detect his evil. I don't have to explain away why no one ever questioned why brother john always wore an amulet around his neck, even when he was asleep. No one can detect these things, and a mystery based plotline is preserved.

Were I mostly dungeon crawling, it wouldn't be so much of a problem. But I don't like dungeons. I like plot.

Forgive me for saying so, but I get the impression that you were simply caught unprepared by the 3rd Ed spell list.

If someone asks, "why haven't these things been detected before?" that's a valid question. As you say, we're largely dealing with low-level spells.

In scenario 1, cannot your summoner summon a low-level nuisance to harass and distract the players? If a quasit is dogging them, making their lives miserable, they might not be focused long enough to aim their detection magic to the right spot. If they do, good for them! They've surmounted another challenge of the scenario.

In scenario 2, why should it be the PCs who think to cast the spell, and not some other group with a 3rd level cleric? Your plot should try to make some degree of sense in the context of the world it inhabits. In a world where magic is commonplace, the PCs should expect to encounter specialist casters who will try to stymie them. In this case, I think it's a simple matter to have a court cleric or wizard who watches the baron's audience chamber from a secret location and attempts to interfere with nosy spellcasters. There are so many ways to accomplish this - with cantrips if counterspells won't do the trick - that it's really just a question of using your imagination.

Moreover, don't forget that these spells have saves. Any item or spell that can boost the interrogated NPC's Will save might do the trick.

In scenario 3, your paladins are wankers. WANKERS! That kind of behavior is just unforgivable: "I'm standing, detecting evil on this wall, for hours on end." Give me a break! Leaving the question of the pure lameness of the approach aside, I really don't understand why the amulet is such a bad choice for that situation. It's appropriate to the NPC's work (he's an assassin, and has to have encountered situations like this before), and the PCs are begging for it by defaulting to their powers instead of trying to role-play. Can you tell me that lycanthropy is an acceptable advantage for an assassin, but a magic item to protect him from divination-like powers is not? If so, I'd say you're being hamstrung by your own preconceptions.

I feel that your NPCs should be reactive to the tactics of the party, too. If the assassin knows that the party is trying to guard his mark, and knows that the party has paladins, he should take appropriate measures. At the very least, he can wander down to a seedy tavern and throw a few gp at some local thugs to create a distraction for him. Hey, mister paladin! You detect evil! Better go fight it while the real evil slips past your 60' range....

Once again, I think you're being intimidated by low-level spells, and are curiously reluctant to use the appropriate countermeasures. There are many - disrupting a spell as it is cast is the easiest way - and not all are so "wanky" as outfitting your NPCs with uniform anti-divination devices. You're clearly an intelligent individual with an active imagination: use it, and stop being bossed around by minor spells that were never intended to disrupt the game on the scale that you're experiencing.

Anecdote: Interpreted a certain way, the Potion of Glibness can wreck an entire campaign. I had players try to tell me that anyone who heard a PC under the influence of the potion would believe *anything* they were told. The rules came to my rescue, as I looked up the Bluff skill and laid the description out for my players. Bluff is not suggestion; despite the fact that the D&D 3.0 description of the Potion of Glibness is poorly written, Bluff very clearly states that it is *not* suggestion.

Read the rules and try to figure the designers' intent. It's part of your job as DM. If a low-level power or spell is giving you headaches, there's a good chance that it is being abused. It's up to you how to redress the problem at that point. Let me be clear: ruling that the power suddenly doesn't work the same way, mid-campaign, is worse in my mind than finding in-game ways of thwarting it.

If you want to run a mystery-based, investigative campaign, you've probably got two choices:

1) Customize the d20 D&D ruleset to favor your campaign. Weaken or abolish divination spells and detection powers. The disadvantage to this approach is that it requires some reworking of the system, and should be laid out for the players *before* they create their characters.

2) Design your scenarios with the existing system in mind. Expect your characters to trot out Detect Evil, etc, and plan for it. In some situations, they should be able to use it to good effect. In others, they should meet well prepared, devious malefactors who aren't going to be stopped by the machinations of Acolytes or a few meddling kids...

Argh...the disadvantage of #2 is that you'll have to comb through the spells and magic items carefully, plan your scenarios with exquisite care, and will still run the risk of your countermeasures seeming trite or facile.

On December 5, 2003 06:34 PM, Cocytus said:
Weaken or abolish divination spells and detection powers. [snip] and should be laid out for the players *before* they create their characters.

That is what I did. Mid Campaign it is a little unfair to change the rules, but you can always discuss it with the players, maybe they will be OK with it.

As to the paladins being Wankers, I don't know about that, they chose paladins for a reason. Now I've already said that I scale down detect evil, so it would not pick up a normal human assassin, but a meditative paladin would definitely detect a demonic assassin, and maybe a wererat as well, I'd have to look up the wererat alignment, but assuming it is evil, I'd let the paladin evil detector work.

I seem to recall 2 paladins in a dungeon crawl, standing 30 feet apart and detecting evil to triangulate on the big baddie in the dungeon. It seemed a little weaselly at the time, but what the heck, once your in a dungeon, the gamist comes out in everyone, and even my adjusted detect evil was up to that task.

Anyway, Cadfan, I suggest talking to the party, if they are OK with a change - problem solved. If not, you lay down the law up front next campaign.

I would also suggest something about the villians in the games. Not every antagonist needs to be evil. Neutral characters can be dangerous when things don't go their way. Now, it might take a bit of work to figure out why this person should be fighting the PCs, but it will certainly remove the effectiveness of detect evil.

You don't have to have mystery absolutely all the time. In fact, sometimes if you put mystery in intentionally the game comes across as being either hideously predictable (See Neverwinter Nights) or so obscure and difficult as to be incomprehensible.

Ashaqua, I have to agree with your point. In my campaign world, there's no good or evil (except where demons and angels are concerned, but that's another story). So, there are very few 'evil' characters. They're quite a few slimy, back-stabbing, lying, cheating, murderous bastards, but they don't consider themselves evil. Likewise, as in our world, there's quite a few deranged, psychotic lunatics, who appear to be evil, just because they're given a position of power. They're not evil in and of themselves, they're just mad.

I think there must be a cult of people who don't get the alignment thing. They all get together in coffee bars and discuss just how Hitler actually isn't chaotic evil, he's more of a neutral evil, and how Napoleon is slightly too complex to qualify for an alignment, and how Tolkien orcs didn't wear socks, and therefore they're clearly chaotic evil, all whilst drinking decaf and shaking uncontrollably.

Mr. Gygax you have a lot to answer for.

You come at us with those fuckin' displacer beasts [Fires gun] and umber hulks [Fires gun] and those big ass, fuckin' eyes [Fires gun] and... HEY! I FOUND ME SOME HAPPINESS! I'M GONNA SHOOT IT NOW! [Fires gun. Twice.]

Hmm... for whatever reason, I'm stuck on the idea that most chaos aligned people are at least slightly looney. It's kind of a word-association thing. I know that's probably not right, but there it is whenever I think of it.

Also we should always remember the setting. After all how common is magic in the campaign? If magic is an accepted part of life in this world than society would have adapted to it. If good and evil cults have been at odds for centuries than both sides should have workable countermeasures for magical detection. Otherwise the Inquisition of the week [whatever name it goes by] would just wander into town, round up everyone detecting the "wrong" alignment and be done with it. Magical detection powers might naturally gravitate to positions of authority; ie. a clerical order that administers justice for the town[or for just its members] and the evil cult providing masking magic to foil the goody-two-shoes[probably for a price]. Also governments and organizations would provide such mystical detection for its Law enforcement arm and counters for its diplomats and assassins. Ditto for the Armies and the Trade Guilds too. In short the law of supply and demand should apply: if magic is very common and available than the counters will be equally common and available. If magic is rare and mysterious than the counters will be fewer and far between.

Also we should always remember the setting. After all how common is magic in the campaign? If magic is an accepted part of life in this world than society would have adapted to it. If good and evil cults have been at odds for centuries than both sides should have workable countermeasures for magical detection. Otherwise the Inquisition of the week [whatever name it goes by] would just wander into town, round up everyone detecting the "wrong" alignment and be done with it. Magical detection powers might naturally gravitate to positions of authority; ie. a clerical order that administers justice for the town[or for just its members] and the evil cult providing masking magic to foil the goody-two-shoes[probably for a price]. Also governments and organizations would provide such mystical detection for its Law enforcement arm and counters for its diplomats and assassins. Ditto for the Armies and the Trade Guilds too. In short the law of supply and demand should apply: if magic is very common and available than the counters will be equally common and available. If magic is rare and mysterious than the counters will be fewer and far between.

Ashaqua, not all chaotic characters are insane. They're just people who break with tradition and go against the grain. People that change things. Freedom fighters are usually chaotic good. Terrorists are usually chaotic evil.

Martin Luther King could be said to be chaotic. As could Nelson Mandela. A chaotic person is someone who does what he thinks is right, regardless of what tradition and society think.

QED = Quod Erat Demonstrandum
"which was to be proved"; meaning something along the lines of "I have presented my evidence which is to solid it is unrefutable, and what I set out to prove is thus proved, end of argument."

I disagree about the law/chaos thing that seems to be going here. I think that law should be called order. A lawful character does not necescarily blindly follow the law of the land. I believe that a lawful person is someone who does everything for a reason and with a distinct pattern. While that patter does not allways seem apparent to anyone but a psychologist. So my point, I do have one, is that it's a personality trait not a doctrine of belief. So a lawful good character will do what is right and good according to a personal code or pattern not what a local barrister says. Also a chaotic charater will have little or no pattern to their actions, good or evil. Hence, ORDER not LAW.

See a post that was allmost totally on topic. Unbeknownst to popular belief it IS possible.

I think good and evil are just inventions of the media. Every time I pick up a newspaper and read about

EVIL mass-murderers
EVIL dictators
EVIL thugs
EVIL paedophiles

And so on, I just have to allow myself a slight giggle. These people aren't evil. They're either victims of abusive backgrounds, or in some way psychologically unhinged. There's no such thing as true evil.

Well .... it all depends on what you mean by the word 'EVIL'. Now when we talk of EVIL people we are into the realms of motivation.

Olly has said that evil people are in some way victims or nuts. I'm not sure that I agree in many cases. For example, I think that it is not an unnatural motivation to try to dominate others. It is in fact a basic human drive related to evolutionary success. Theres nothing twisted or crazy about it. Its even beneficial in moderation.

But Its also a basic human drive to co-operate. This also has benefits in evolutionary and survival terms. In many ways the word EVIL has meaning only in terms of the tension between these two basic motivations.

I believe that what we can legitimately call Evil, is where the human drive to dominate and succeed, takes control over an individuals actions to such an extent that it seriously endangers the general good.

Using this criteria, My list of EVIL guys would include many (NOT ALL) of the movers and shakers of this world, because many of them promote their own interests in such a way that the life, wealth, and liberties of large groups of people are endangered.

J'accuse Cadfan of having a blind spot in regard of Detection spells. I think you are obsessive in trying to limit the information that your player characters have, and I find your example if the Paladins detect evil tactics in your campaign as thoroughly unconvincing.

I applaud the Paladins efforts to use the resources at their disposal. I'm not as harsh on them as Cocytus. They came up with a plan and got lucky. However, it was not a fool proof plan. They did get lucky. Heres a list of very simple things that the assassin could have done to improve his chances. If he was so sh*t hit, then he should have been able to do them:

(1) Arrange a distraction. An attack, an explosion, an illusion, a bloody smoke bomb ! anything to get the defenders off guard and concentrating somewhere else. Its the oldest trick in the book.

(2) some kind of anti detection device.

(3) some kind of getaway plan. What self respecting mega assassing-goes into action without a potion of gaseous feom or similar.

(4) I'm not even trying yet ...

Similarly there are any number of tactics the players could have employed that were more imaginative and less wasteful than having Paladins on shift work. For example:

(1) moving the victim to another location with decoys and under an anti detection device.

(2) substituting a double.

(3) setting a trap for the assassin.

(4) tell me when you get bored ....

Anyway Cadfan, two of us quite experienced chaps are telling you this, so please consider if our advice is justified.

1) Any answer that claims to be based on "common sense" but is really based on making Rule Zero edits to the function of detection spells or of the alignment system, is not an answer at all unless you can show me why making YOUR rule zero edit to the game is better than making MY rule zero edit to the game, whic is just plain discouraging and/or eliminating radar style detection spells.

2) Any answer that relies upon some sort of rare counter device is also no answer. I hate when someone brings up a problem in the rules and instantly everyone says, "Ah, but that won't work in an anti magic field!" Look, I don't play a game where I can rely upon conveniently placed anti magic fields. Just how common are those supposed to be? The same applies to detection foils. I can't give them to everybody. The players would be annoyed, and rightly so, if every enemy worth worrying about was conveniently loaded with alignment detection foiling items and undetectable magic aura spells. I just don't play a game where all major enemies can have "stock magic gear." If you do, great. I don't. In addition, I hate when encounters turn into chess games of spell and counter spell, or worse, item and counter item. I just don't think that's fun, and I think it marginalizes character abilities.

3) Any accusation that I am trying to unfairly limit my players knowledge is open to the response that, well, there's nothing sacrosanct about the existance of radar detection spells. Many rule systems don't have them at all. Removing them does not nerf any character class, and allows creative, non magical play. A lot of the function of magic in the game is to fiat certain results. For example, instead of the PCs having to find and steal the key to a particular chamber from a guard, they just cast knock. This is not inherently bad, (in that particular example, it would be just fine) but each means by which regular, long, thought out, and engaging solutions to problems are bypassed with the announcement of a particular spell being cast eliminates a scenario that could be played out. In a fantasy game, a lot of this is expected, some of it is good, some of it is neutral, and some of it is just silly. I suspect we all have our limits on the extent to which magic's intervention in the world is acceptable before it becomes silly. Common complaints I've seen around this forum generally center on raise dead, alignment issues, and castles in a world of flying, disintegration lobbing wizards. I draw my line at giving all the paladins a mystical sixth sense for detecting bad guys. I draw this line because in my campaign type, that's not convenient for game play. If I were playing a different campaign type, perhaps this would not be a problem.

This theoretical objection to the high power of magic is a lot of the reason behind why many people enjoy low magic campaigns. Its because they think of cool scenarios- and then realize that these scenarios can be entirely bypassed by the use of a cheap potion or spell. Like, infiltrating a castle. In low magic games you might play an extensive game of hide and seek with the guards as you work your way inside the castle, stealing keys and unlocking doors, then returning them to the guards room so that no one even knows that an intruder is present. In a high magic game you might cast invisibility and fly, and go in through the top window directly to your target. In that game, instead of dodging guards now you're dodging the enemy's wizards, and their detection magic and magical traps. Its no less a game, but its a different game. Depending on which one you like, you may have to curtail the effect of magic somewhat. Its entirely your call. I happen to like the first type.

4) Any solution that relies upon the players volunarily limiting their own abilities is also no solution. From the players perspective, if a spell will work, why not use it? The player is roleplaying from the perspective of his character, and his character is quite logically going to take the route with the greatest chance of success.

1) The distraction. It is, as Mo points out, the oldest trick in the book. It is also applicable to two of your scenarios.

2) Counter-magic. You address the issue of unusual magical items, but what about other spells and spellcasters? If one 3rd-level cleric can cast Zone of Truth, another can stop her. The party has a cleric. Why can't the bad guys?

These suggestions involve neither modifications to the rules nor unfairl weaseling on the part of the GM.

Also, I thought of #3: the etiquette protocol of spellcasting. On the "Moral Compass" thread, both Nephandus and Ashagua pointed out that most people don't have spellcraft. People going around casting spells without warning or explanation are likely to be attacked; it seems to me that this should put a damper on clerics trying to sniff out the traitorous baron from your scenario #2.

I've been trying to avoid examining my scenarios under a microscope for two reasons. First, because those are just examples, and I think the problem is wider than just those examples I've given, and second, because while I am not the perfect DM, and there are solutions I could have used in those situations, I do not think they would solve the underlying problem.

My assassin did use a distraction of sorts- he set the room on fire. I'm totally ok with the assassin getting killed. I just don't like the method used to do it- I think it reduced creativity within the game.

The enemies did have a cleric- but it was 1) too low level and 2) dead. :-) Generally, here's my thing-

Conflicts that boil down to item versus counter item- HATE them. Destroys the uniqueness of characters. Feels forced and inappropriate when it happens too often.

Conflicts that boil down to spell versus counter spell- Mixed feelings. Sometimes this is great. Sometimes its lame. Doesn't feel forced or inappropriate, unless its constantly the same set of spells versus the same set of counter spells, every time. Then it destroys variety.

Conflicts that boil down to character type versus counter character type- basically the bread and butter of the game. Generally what you're doing. Only a problem when it gets repetitious, which doesn't happen TOO often.

Conflicts that boil down to strategy versus counter strategy- excellent. Magic can be used here, as can anything else. Examples? The infamous "toss the mage in the water then club him like a seal when he can't cast spells and swim at the same time" trick from a long ago game. Or the "scout the evil monster's lair carefully, identify its exits, then stoneshape the darned thing shut with the monster inside." Those are the encounters the players remember- when they were able to creatively defeat dangerous opponents using primarily their own wits.

My goal is to encourage the fourth option as much as possible.

As for the protocol of spell casting, I think it depends on the world you're in. In my campaign, the characters were law enforcement officers investigating criminal acts. I gave them a bit of leeway in terms of what they could get away doing, as long as they were operating in the course of their investigation. For example, once the bad guys were sufficiently narrowed down, I would let them bluster the nobles into submitting to a magical truth test. I didn't think that was unreasonable. However, in a later mission when our trigger happy mage decided to lightning bolt two werewolves (who were admittedly out to kill the players) who were in the middle of the street acting peacefully in human form, I had them chased out of the city by a lynch mob, and the baron of the city broke off relations with them, even after they explained that detect magic and detect evil had both indicated that these were the bad guys.

In truly high magic campaigns, I don't think the "magical stigma" works so well, actually. If your local village cleric can and does cast spells for the benefit of the community, and there's a druid in your woods, and everybody at least knows somebody who's cousin's friend is studying magic, I doubt it would be that stigmatized. I think its low magic campaigns where that would be an issue. That being said, I don't recall anywhere in the rules that indicates that paladins make any noise or do anything odd when detecting evil. I believe it just says "concentration." I have had the issue of how concealable spell casting is come up in my campaigns, and I've generally made the decision on the fly. Depending on how elaborate the spells components are, and what the spell is, I pick whether it can be done by quietly muttering in the corner of a bar while drinking your beer, or whether its done by loudly proclaiming your god's powers to the world.

Oh well. I guess its rather a moot point. Its just kind of sinking in that until I finish school, I won't be gaming. I'm in a new city, and I can't find a gaming group in my area that works with my schedule. Even if I did, I doubt I'd be able to just walk in and DM- I'd have to sit on the other side of the table for a while. No problem with that, but I've been the default DM for my friends for so long that it will feel... weird. :-)

Cadfan, I don't mean to pick a fight, really. I just want to understand the strange creature that you are (having given up on Olly a few weeks ago).

How is the smart use of stone shape (wall of stone would have also done it) any different than the use of detect evil? I mean it's using magic as a clean, simple solution to a big problem. Although the monsters might always dig themselves out, but that's another story.

Also how is the spell vs counter spell any different than skill vs counter skill?

I mean, the rogues and rangers with their +15 move silently and hide vs the guards' +X in spot and listen sound exactly like spell vs counterspell to me.

Also, while invisibility and fly are quite nice to get in alone. It makes a coordinated assault somewhat difficult, since you can't see one another and communicate by sign.

I once had an ambush foiled by my own supposed cleverness. We were all invisible and I cast silence. The GM being a quick witted guy picked at random which character would start the attack (since we had no way of talking to each other) he then randomly (using a scatter dice and a d4) moved us away from our planned spots and said.

"Ok your all getting into position, but suddenly (rolls dice) James character appears out of thin air and attacks his target, while you're (rolls dice) here, (rolls dice) here and (rolls dice) here. Initiatives guys."

That was all within the rules, there was no manabable involved and no fudging.

Your alignment thing works just the same. In any city or country rulers will make deals with evil people and choose the lesser evil of dealing with the devil they know. If a paladin starts hacking at every evil person in town (who might be lawfull to the crown) then new bad guys could emerge, aliances broken, etc. That is also all within the rules and explains why such things usually don't happen.

I mean otherwise all one evil group would have to do is hire a neutral or unwitting good guy, give him some info on some rival group and let the good guys hack away at the bad guys while they took awayt their piece of the action.

Once the good guys have spent their resources fighting their rivals, the bad guys get rid of them and it passes for retribution from the former rivals.

Magical stigma would still work in high magic campaigns. How to you feel when someone walks up to you while cleaning his gun? Drawing his gun? Loading his gun? Cocking his gun? Pointing his gun?
All these make me nervous (well maybe not the cleaning part), but guns are more common in Canada than magic users are is in the Forgotten Realms.

The local cleric has cast spells to heal, help the crops, etc. But he's also smoten ennemies, cursed criminals, called spiritual weapons, etc. A wandering cleric (usually what adventurers are, would make them a bit nervous, especially if it's a cleric of a god of war, retribution, etc.)

Finaly
While I completely agree with you that strategy vs counter strategy is the most stimulating kind of challenge, removing and downgrading the abilities of certain character classes kind of destroys balance in the game. I mean a paladin isn't that great a fighter or a caster system. Smite and detect evil and divine grace are what make paladins appealing as PC's (from a game mechanics point of view).
If spell casters and paladins are down graded, well maybe rogues, fighters, assassins, orks, dragons, etc, should all be down graded as well to reflect that and keep it in balance.

On Anti magic:

While dead zones are rare, many forms of dispell magics and wards (globes, screens, spell turning, spell resistance, etc) exist and are more or less common. Maybe not a permanently magic proof castle (which would prevent magic healing inside the walls). But having the main keep guarded with glyphs of dispellment, etc. Isn't so high magic, certainly lesser magic than stoneshaping a whole cave complex fast enough to entomb a horde of mosters.

Thieving Guilds are as advertized as the Mob, Biker Gangs and Street Gangs. See much of them being busted without a gazillion ton of proof? OK without lawyers one would need less. But still you get my point.

Al Capone was to every one the boss of the US illegal alcool trade during the prohibition. Everybody knew it. They still caught him on tax evasion...

"How is the smart use of stone shape (wall of stone would have also done it) any different than the use of detect evil?"

Because that happened once, and involved creativity and intelligence. I don't think that "lets use detect evil to find the bad guy... again!" involves creativity or intelligence. Maybe the first time, for new players, but not the fifth or sixth.

"Also how is the spell vs counter spell any different than skill vs counter skill?"

The skills involve planning. I don't let a pc just declare, "I'm hiding now," and then do a hide versus spot check. If the pc is in an empty corridor with nothing to hide behind, no amount of skill will let them succeed. This means other tactics, like staying out of sight, etc, come into play. It means you get to role play the whole encounter. The main difference is how much player involvement there is- if its resolved by a quick dice roll, and whoever rolls better wins, that's silly. That's giving the dice too much power over the game. There are three powers in the game- the players, the DM, and the dice. They all have to be balanced. Too much to the players, and the DM can't create a meaningful, fun plot. Too much to the DM, and the players can't create their own story. Too much to the dice, and you'd might as well just shoot craps.

"Magical stigma would still work in high magic campaigns. How to you feel when someone walks up to you while cleaning his gun? Drawing his gun? Loading his gun? Cocking his gun? Pointing his gun?"

Magic, especially in high magic campaigns, has a lot more function to it than the function of a gun. A gun is only for shooting someone. Just because we play heroes all the time, maybe we forget that magic would be also used for a wide array of purposes other than killing people in a high magic world. Healing them, for one. For luck. For farming. In a blacksmith's forge. I think the game tends to drop the ball a little bit on explaining how non combat magic works, but if you're in a game where the list prices for magical items apply, you're in a world where a street musician who saves enough money can buy himself a potion of cure light wounds. You have to expect that people would be familiar with non-killing-things magic.

"While I completely agree with you that strategy vs counter strategy is the most stimulating kind of challenge, removing and downgrading the abilities of certain character classes kind of destroys balance in the game."

The only thing I downgraded was detect evil. Smite, spells, etc, are all still there. I really, really don't think unlimited detect evil was meant to be one of the prime functions of a paladin within the game. Do you honestly feel that removing detect evil from the paladin makes them so much worse that people would choose not to play them?

"Isn't so high magic, certainly lesser magic than stoneshaping a whole cave complex fast enough to entomb a horde of mosters."

Actually it was just the cave entrance, and the monster was asleep, gorged on cattle.

"You have to expect that people would be familiar with non-killing-things magic."

Sure, but how many of them know what spell is being cast *as* it is being cast? Only those with spellcraft. I think any other observer would be frightened, or at the very least uneasy, to see a stranger start casting a spell. I think Sam's gun analogy is a good one: even though magic is a gun that can do more than kill, it has the potential to kill, and that's got to be going through the mind of anyone potentially threatened by it.

I've always felt that alignment was something of a tool for the PC to use, but more of a way to describe how something (like an organization) is in general.
For example: If you take the idea of a church where the head priest is corrupt. The church may be lawful good, but that doesn't mean that you have to BE lawful good to be a member or a leader, you just have to ACT lawful good in order to win the church's trust (I don't mean the physical building, of course).
That being said, I feel that a character who is chaotic evil is more effectivly played if they act all nice and happy, but are plotting nasty things, and lieing about who they are. It is very difficult to keep a party together when one player has a character who has a completely different alignment than the other characters. Unless they have to work together why would they?
First opportunity they get they would part ways.
Alignment really should be up to the player. If they feel that they want to play strictly the way that the alignment dictates then so be it, but otherwise, any lawful good person can commit murder. Does that mean that they were never lawful good to begin with? No, I don't think so.
Evil characters can feel loyalty as well. It doesn't mean that they have to kill everything and ruin everyone's day. They can go about things with a selfish, evil intent.
They say that in the 80's they did a study of a cross section of business executives and found that a lot of them fit the profile of a psychopath. All that that means is that they have no sense of feeling or compasion for anyone other than themselves (if that). But that doesn't mean that they don't act civil.
Anyways, that's all I have to say, except that I disagree... I think Batman is Neutral Good. He is a vigilante and that is illigal, as well he will do whatever it takes to get the job done, even if it mean murder.
Having said that, I really haven't read all that many Batman comics.

I've always felt that alignment was something of a tool for the PC to use, but more of a way to describe how something (like an organization) is in general.
For example: If you take the idea of a church where the head priest is corrupt. The church may be lawful good, but that doesn't mean that you have to BE lawful good to be a member or a leader, you just have to ACT lawful good in order to win the church's trust (I don't mean the physical building, of course).
That being said, I feel that a character who is chaotic evil is more effectivly played if they act all nice and happy, but are plotting nasty things, and lieing about who they are. It is very difficult to keep a party together when one player has a character who has a completely different alignment than the other characters. Unless they have to work together why would they?
First opportunity they get they would part ways.
Alignment really should be up to the player. If they feel that they want to play strictly the way that the alignment dictates then so be it, but otherwise, any lawful good person can commit murder. Does that mean that they were never lawful good to begin with? No, I don't think so.
Evil characters can feel loyalty as well. It doesn't mean that they have to kill everything and ruin everyone's day. They can go about things with a selfish, evil intent.
They say that in the 80's they did a study of a cross section of business executives and found that a lot of them fit the profile of a psychopath. All that that means is that they have no sense of feeling or compasion for anyone other than themselves (if that). But that doesn't mean that they don't act civil.
Anyways, that's all I have to say, except that I disagree... I think Batman is Neutral Good. He is a vigilante and that is illigal, as well he will do whatever it takes to get the job done, even if it mean murder.
Having said that, I really haven't read all that many Batman comics.

CADFAN SAID:
'They won't destabilize a campaign if the campaign plot doesn't involve hidden, evil elements. The fact that my campaigns tend to have so much to detect makes the spells not so great for game balance.'

MO REPLIES:
You have made this argument several times, despite being shown again and again the limlitations of Detect Evil spells. I put it to you that your campaigns are really not so much different from iother peoples. We all have hidden Evil elements. Reading between the lines I sense that your real objection is because you have a certain view of the way that Players should solve a problem, and you don't like to see them shortcutting your process.

CADFAN SAID:
'This theoretical objection to the high power of magic is a lot of the reason behind why many people enjoy low magic campaigns. Its because they think of cool scenarios- and then realize that these scenarios can be entirely bypassed by the use of a cheap potion or spell. Like, infiltrating a castle. In low magic games you might play an extensive game of hide and seek with the guards as you work your way inside the castle, stealing keys and unlocking doors, then returning them to the guards room so that no one even knows that an intruder is present. In a high magic game you might cast invisibility and fly, and go in through the top window directly to your target. In that game, instead of dodging guards now you're dodging the enemy's wizards, and their detection magic and magical traps. Its no less a game, but its a different game. Depending on which one you like, you may have to curtail the effect of magic somewhat. Its entirely your call. I happen to like the first type.'

MO REPLIES:
Cadfan, this bit of your post clearly demonstrates what I said above. In your own words, you enjoy a certain way for characters to solve a problem. But the game is not about enforcing your likes or dislikes (Except on the general Campaign level). Its much more about you setting general goals and obstacles ans leaving it up to the players to determine how they want to solve the problem.

To give you a real example which almost exactly parallels the example you have given above. The best DM I ever played for had a deserted building and tower that he had designed and set up, with various situations and encounters to get there. The main treasure room was at the top of the tower. Now he had a drawing of the tower and I noticed that at every floor there was a ledge and that the roof was tiled with slaes. My thief climbed 50 feet to the top with relative ease using the convenient ledges and the slates were easily removed. The party climbed up using ropes and entered the main treasure room directly, killing the monsters there and getting the treasure for very little effort. Rather than try to stop us or penalize us, the DM actally rewarded us with MORE xps for circumventing his obstacles in a clever way.

Now in the same situation, I am sure that you would have found some way of foiling our emminently reasonable approach and forcing us to go through the hoops of your design.

Please note, that there was no magick involved on our part. We used ordinary thief skills and climbing gear in a clever way. The magick argument is really a red herring. The fact is that intelligent players will always find ways around your plans, and as a DM you should REWARD them for this rather than try to STOP them.

"You have made this argument several times, despite being shown again and again the limlitations of Detect Evil spells. I put it to you that your campaigns are really not so much different from iother peoples. We all have hidden Evil elements. Reading between the lines I sense that your real objection is because you have a certain view of the way that Players should solve a problem, and you don't like to see them shortcutting your process."

The first half of that- Mo, if I recall, you yourself rule zero detect evil. You just forgive yourself for it because you say your rule zero is a commonly accepted means of doing it.

The second half-

Rules in a game are something called "enabling constraints." They set the available options for the players. Now, with that in mind, consider the following-

In 3.0, buff spells lasted for hours. Most parties in many games used them constantly. The game designers concluded that these spells were being abused, and were being over used so much so that other spells were not getting used. So, they nerfed them and made them last for only minutes. They also moved some up in level, and made some less available to certain character classes. All these changes are implemented in 3.5. Now these spells get used a lot less. But, other spells are used more. By RESTRICTING an ability, namely buff spells, the game designers INCREASED choice. Previously, there were *technically* more choices, but since one choice was clearly superior according to so many, the choice was a false one.

Take another example. Suppose we made wish a first level spell, and took away all the material components. That would certainly increase choices, right? After all, wish can do almost anything, so the PCs would be able to do almost anything, right?

The problem is, while it added choices, it also made all the other choices worthless. I don't know of any first level spell thats equal in power to a componentless wish. By adding this choice, we made it so that all first level wizards and sorcerors will cast basically just one spell, repeatedly.

In your scenario about the tower, I would very much appreciate your solution. I wouldn't try to "get around it" in any way.

BUT. A counter example that more adequately describes what bothers me- Lets say your PCs obtain the spell dimension door, and just teleport into the final room. They do so, defeat the enemies and leave. Then, next week, they're faced with a dungeon. They scry, dimension door into the final enemy's chamber, and kill it. Then they do it again next week at a castle. And again next week in a dungeon again.

That's bad, and there's two possible solutions. Solution one is "getting around" the players decisions. Oddly enough, that's the thing you're against, but its also the thing that most of your answers to me have argued in favor of. Getting around the players solution is when suddenly anti magic fields and anti scrying devices become ubiquitous amongst major bad guys, even though that's not really realistic considering the frequency with which those are supposed to exist in the game. Solution 2 is the solution you don't like, but I do- if your game is showing you that scrying and dimension door are broken and poorly balanced, then get rid of them. I think it makes for a better game if the players know up front that they don't have something, rather than giving them an ability then denying them the opportunity to use it.

ie, I think a player with no flying ring is happier than a player with a flying ring, but who's only adventures take place in rooms with 10 foot ceilings.

I'd actually join the discussion at hand, but I pretty much agree with Mo.

I would also add that magic generally needs some kind of tactics to work as well as anyone would want. Even with the standard Fireball and Lightning Bolt, you still have to aim so you won't hit your friends. Detect Evil doesn't even tell you where things are located until about 18 seconds after you've started. That's 18 seconds of concentrating. Lots of things can happen in 18 seconds. Especially if one of those things happens to break the character's concentration. How many paladins do you know that take that skill?

This discussion is a lot like any discussion about the skills in Diablo II. Most people use the best skills they can so that they're character can be the best on the Realms. That is, until Blizzard changes the way the skills work so that a new set of skills is "best".

The lesson that we can learn from this is that players tend to use their best option. Once abuse has been identified, it's very hard to correct by making everything balanced again. Unfortunately, you can't change the way people think. Twinkers will be twinkers, and it is very hard for anyone to get them to stop being twinkers. I know that there has been a thread on this issue before.

If a certain group of adventurers continually use a certain strategy (cheap or not), word will eventually gets out. Even if said adventurers leave no survivors, rumor will always spread. Its a fundamental law of the multiverse. Therefore, people who might at sometime be involved against these adventurers will take measures to stop this strategy. The likelihood of this happening increases with the adventurers fame and reputation. A certain cabal might concievably seek out an antimagic field for the express purpose of foiling scrying.

I think Kirk would be more Chaotic Good due to the fact that he seldom went along with procedure but was allways working for good.

Spock is right on. "The need os the many outweigh the needs of the one."

Tsulu I think was more Chaotic Good.

And you forgot Checkov, jeez, what the hell's wrong with you Ash? Checkov I would also make Chaotic Good.

Now to up the nerd factor one more time. You can compare those allignment lists and really see the differenses in the feels of the two shows. And that statement is still on topic as it shows how a party's allignments affect how they act and the kinds of things that they do.

I congratulate you on not getting upset by my criticism. Some guys would have got abusive under such sustained criticism. Your last post was interesting and I want to address the points you made there:

(1) CADFAN said
'The first half of that- Mo, if I recall, you yourself rule zero detect evil. You just forgive yourself for it because you say your rule zero is a commonly accepted means of doing it.'

MO replies:
I'm not sure what you mean by rule zero, what I use is the convention that detect evil only shows up strong evil. I don't scrap the spell altogether. And I do this because I believe that true evil is very rare, not because I want to limit the information to players. In any case, I am not against scrapping or modifying spells. I am against this particular change because I truly don't see the spell as destabilising. The arguments have been well rehearsed above.

(2)
CADFAN SAID:
'3.5. Now these spells get used a lot less. But, other spells are used more. By RESTRICTING an ability, namely buff spells, the game designers INCREASED choice. Previously, there were *technically* more choices, but since one choice was clearly superior according to so many, the choice was a false one.'

(2)
CADFAN SAID:
'3.5. Now these spells get used a lot less. But, other spells are used more. By RESTRICTING an ability, namely buff spells, the game designers INCREASED choice. Previously, there were *technically* more choices, but since one choice was clearly superior according to so many, the choice was a false one.

MO replies:
I can't really talk about buff spells or nerfing because I'm still on 2.0
In any case, the kind of choice that you're talking about is not the kind of choice that I am talking about. What I want to give players, is the real plot choices the can if necessary completely redirect the course of the campaign. I'm also not saying that Detect Evil is so important in itself, I'm saying that the tendency to restrict player information is often the sign of a controlling DM.

(3)
CADFAN SAID:
'Take another example. Suppose we made wish a first level spell,'

MO replies:
I agree with this example, but it is an extreme example to make a point. In any case I have already replied that I am not against removing or modifying destabilising spells.

(4)
CADFAN SAID:
'In your scenario about the tower, I would very much appreciate your solution. I wouldn't try to "get around it" in any way.'

MO replies:
I'm glad to hear it. Perhaps I have been misrepresenting your view. Its just that from your comments, it has seemed to me that you want to guide the story closely. Sorry if I was wrong.

(5)
CADFAN said:
'That's bad, and there's two possible solutions. Solution one is "getting around" the players decisions. Oddly enough, that's the thing you're against, but its also the thing that most of your answers to me have argued in favor of. Getting around the players solution is when suddenly anti magic fields and anti scrying devices become ubiquitous amongst major bad guys, even though that's not really realistic considering the frequency with which those are supposed to exist in the game. Solution 2 is the solution you don't like, but I do- if your game is showing you that scrying and dimension door are broken and poorly balanced, then get rid of them.'

MO replies:
Now here, I disagree with you strongly. My solution would probably be nothing like you suggest. I would not prolifferate anti-devices that just couln't exist in those numbers. I would come out with a plausible response in which the campaign organically responds to the players. This is very easy to do with just a bit of imagination. Let me give you my immediate thoughts on this problem:

First: where are all these castles or lairs that the players are attacking ? They are part of a kingdom or alliance of some sort. They are owned by powerful and energetic men with many resources and allies. Sure you might knock off one or two. But this would begin to ring alarm bells in the minds of other lords. They would bend their power and resources to finding out who was taking them out so easily, and the players would eventually be called to account by a higher authority.

Please note, it may appear that I am limiting the actions of the players here, after telling you that this is a bad thing. But its not me. I have no desire in any way to direct the players actions. It is the logic of the campaign that is intervening. What is happenning is what I think the logical response of the campaign npc's would be under those circumstances.

Anyway, what I'm suggesting to you is that there is a better way to limit players actions. Let your campaign do it in a natural response rather than by banning certain choices. Off- course I still agree with you that you should still remove or ban truly destabilising spells or items.

Sometimes removing those items of 'Phenomenal Cosmic Power' is necessary to keeping game balance. It may be a seemingly tragic loss to the game party OR to a individual. But, sometimes as a GM, we grant a player a special ability, item, weapon, etc. that may seem like a cool idea...

But, after a short while, the GM can discover a miscalculation or loophole in the item, that makes it TOO powerful.

I remember playing a game where the GM introduced necromancy of his OWN design to the game, because a player wanted to try a darker role for a change. At first, the system worked well, but on a larger scale, the now 2nd level necro-dude was re-animating giant monsters (e.g. - zomgie giant crab w/ 800HP) with an armor class that could only be breached with a CRIT.

Needless to say, necromancy in the game took a severe demotion. The player was pissed and never got over it, and soon quit playing. Of course, everyone ELSE knew it was unfair and wanted a balanced game, but HE was a little too selfish...

It was just an experimental system of necromancy implemented into a world that previously had NO necromancy. After this incident, we tweaked it a little, and it worked great. But by that time, Mr. Grumpy-gills had quit the game, so we just put the necro-notes aside.

Methinks this has the makings of a counterpoint article. I'm sick, so I was only able to skim the article in question, but here's a response that is probaby far too long and definitely not finished. ;)

I must confess, I really like the D&D alignment system. One reason is because it has the best and most elegant definition of evil that I've ever seen. I got most of this from 2nd edition, where they remove the silly references to "the most dangerous" or "the best" alignments and give it to your straight. Also, the Book of Vile Darkness does a great job of outlining a lot of what constitutes evil without being silly about it.

There are three main components here: intent, result, and for lack of a better phrase, what I call "due diligence."

Intent consists of what the individual knows about the situation, and what they think will result from their actions. If you shoot the merchant with the intent of robbing him, that's evil.

The result is what actually happens. If you shoot the merchant, but as it turns out, he was operating a child slavery ring, then the act probably falls into the neutral category in terms of overarching effect. However, if a Good or Lawful character were to perform this act without this knowledge, it would still be evil, because they had no reason to suspect that he was operating such a ring.

"Due diligence" is what I call the burden of exploring other, less destructive / pain causing courses of action before embarking on one that you believe will cause pain / destruction. So, to borrow an example from the Book of Vile Darkness, if you see believe that the entire town is evil, and you poison the water supply, that's evil; unless you have some way to verify that everyone in the town is evil, you run the risk of killing lots and lots of potentially innocent people. There are also likely to be other avenues of approach in order to address this problem. (As the stakes go up, though, the line between what is acceptable and what is not to starts to blur and break...)

Good people have equal, if not greater consideration for others' pleasures, wants, and needs in combination with their own. Someone who is good must have beneficent intent and must have done a reasonable job of making sure that their actions will not cause pain or destruction. The result factors in if the intent was good but the result was bad; remorse or some feeling of the necessity for reparation are characteristic of good people (but perhaps not of neutral characters, for instance).

Evil is defined as placing your own pleasures, wants, and needs above those of others. With evil, the result of your actions aren't as important as the intent, as remaining evil does not have same the burden as remaining good does. Thus, "due diligence" is sort of irrelevant here, for there is no burden of evil (unless you've got a really weird evil thing going on, in which case you just flip the rules for that case), and often, it's either irrelevant or essential that harm is caused.

By this logic, painful or destructive acts are not _innately_ evil as long as they are committed with altruistic intent. If it looks like they'll cause a great deal of pain or destruction, then before you proceed, you must have attempted to discover other alternatives ("due diligence").

So, to apply this notion of determining good/evil to one of the examples discussed... Why is this Lawful Good character torturing this evil thing? To find out information? What is at stake? A village, national security, a spoiled friend of the king, or money? Are there other, less violent alternatives, such as divination spells? How much effort is he putting into finding any alternatives? The theme here is that in general, causing pain is not a Good Thing, and good characters should consider any pain inflicted to be _regrettable_, if nothing else.

As for "radar" characters, I don't think that you should be able to walk into the town square, cast Detect Evil, and point out who is evil and who isn't. Only the strictest interpretation of the rules, without any consideration for the details of how general D&D metaphysics operate, allows for this method.

For example, I think there is a rather significant difference between the evil merchant who cheats his customers, and an evil priest who sacrifices babies.

The overarching principle here is that it is a burden to be good, as you have obligations to fulfill in trying not to cause harm. Evil characters are less likely to have such an obligation, as good implies some manner of self-sacrifice, and evil implies self-servitude, and it's easier to serve yourself than it is to serve others.

As your ability to pursue "due diligence" increases (that is, as you become more powerful or more competent), the obligation of a good character to do so increases because he is able to more thoroughly research the consequences of his actions. Furthermore, as he is more powerful and resourceful, he is likely to take advantage of his power and resources, which means that his actions are likely to have far greater consequences.

Those who have fewer resources, fewer avenues to consider, and less power are less likely to affect people and events in any significant way. So, while the merchant is causing pain of some sort or another, it's a rather ordinary, localized, and superficial kind of pain.
There isn't really any metaphysical or supernatural "oomph" behind the merchant's deeds (this is where my Planescape feelings come in). In my estimation, he is still evil, but he's not Evil.

The evil priest, on the other hand, has dedicated his life to being evil, has taken pains to persist in his evil, and reaps the benefits of his evil. He is also evil on another level, a magical level, as he has powerful magical tools at his disposal, and has pledged his alleigance to a magical evil. His actions are much more likely to have farther reaching painful/destructive results that are intentional, than a single cheating merchant; indeed, he is much more likely to be able to find ways to cause _more_ pain and destruction with the aid of his god, spells, and other resources.

Another component is that experience and levels are often categorized as a metaphysical general sort of vibrancy of life (hence, undead level drain and that sort of thing). Those that are more vibrant and more powerful (i.e., higher level, and not commoners) have the potential to cause greater harm. Someone of higher level is also far more likely to be cognizant of the consequences and more capable of "due diligence."

Thus, a 20th level character who is neutral evil would definitely be show up as Evil, as you don't see a 20th level character every day and her actions are far more likely to have great consequence. Conversely, a 3rd level character (or a commoner) might not show up as evil simply because it means less for him to be evil. As you go up in levels and become more resourceful and powerful, the burden of "due diligence" and examining your motives becomes greater. Likewise, NPC classes don't really allow a whole lot of room for Evil, because they are essentially simpler and less powerful, although high levels of NPC classes could most certainly lead to Evil characters with sufficient levels or intent.

(Of course, a number of factors such as right place, right time could change this; a 1st level commoner who opts to destroy a good diety for personal gain would probably show up as Evil simply because that is an event of cosmic result.)

The in-game result is that detection spells will reveal all of the obvious culprits (creatures that are evil by nature), and evil creatures of some cosmic significance (i.e., high level characters or characters that have devoted a significant portion of their lives to a given good/evil and/or lawful/chaotic principle). A high level would most certainly show up, a mid-level character would most likely show up, and a low level one would not.

You can make this as uncomplicated or as complicated as you like, of course. Maybe someone who is mid-level but has been evil their whole life has more of an aura of evil than someone who high level, but has only just begun the downward spiral. Maybe low level characters _do_ show up as evil, but only very faintly, such that it's difficult to pinpoint whether it's background noise or a specific person. (That could lead to some interesting dynamics, with the hairs on a Paladin's neck prickling while at court, little knowing that it's not the king's adviser that is evil, but his daughter.)

In case you hadn't noticed, the idea here is to make these matters a little more analog than digital, and base it more on how the character is played than anything else. The model of intent, result, and "due diligence" are fairly simple to apply to any situation, and so I've found it to be very useful.

With regards to Law(ful)/Order(ed), it's a question of scope. In general, Lawful people in your average fantasy world are those who follow the laws of the land. Some exceptions might be people that follow their own set of Laws, indepedent of some legislative body, but I'd still call that behavior Lawful (it's just a bit more subjective). When you start playing with higher concepts and more powerful forces is when it starts to become clear that Order is a more appropriate term than Lawful. It's simpler to saw "Lawful" than "Ordered," and unless you're delving deep into metaphysics, that distinction isn't likely to come up.

Wow. Okay, yeah, that was absurdly long. :) I guess that is good, though, because it is mostly substance.

But yeah, I will do some refinement as soon as I am not sick. :) I've been itching to write an article ever since I read the anti-Halfling one. (Halflings in Dark Sun are awesome! Just run them similarly in another setting! Too bad I couldn't make an article of it.)

Alignment is also relative, just as the concepts of "good" and "evil" are relative. They have to be relative, because "evil" is a label that is stamped onto everything that people deem "wrong," each using their own set of morals to define it.

EXAMPLE FROM THE MEDIA: In an anime which I shall leave unnamed for the sake of those who haven't watched the season I'm talking about, there is one "villain" (Villan_1) who started out a lot like the main hero of the show (Hero_1), with the same job to protect the human race from the "evil" creatures of a parallel dimension. Villan_1 has a very black-and-white veiw of the world, however, where Hero_1 does not. So Villan_1's alignment when he was fighting the "evil" creatures (which he believed were all evil, bloodthirsty savages) in order to protect the human race was, and I'm sure most who can figure out the anime and characters in question will agree with me, "Lawful Good." Now, this got a bit shaken up by a little grey dot that we shall name "Villan_1's hopelessly and mindlessly devoted gay lover who is the reason why they say that 'love is blind, deaf, and generally oblivious.'"

...

Actually, let's just call him "Pet."

Pet is one of the "evil" creatures from that other dimension. However, he showed that he was capable of rational thought and "human" emotion when, during their first real meeting (wherein Villan_1 was going to kill Pet on principle, but asked if Pet had any final requests first), Pet asked Villan_1 to let him live for one more day, because his "favorite TV drama is airing its season finale tommorrow," then began to laugh/cry (it seemed to be a mix of the two).

Turns out that Villan_1 watches the same show every week, too. And so, Pet was spared, and they became close friends (and they later became lovers, although it is never told exactly when this occured).

Now, one day, Villan_1 (along with Pet) was on a "mission" to stop this multi-billion dollar black market industry (which we shall call "MBDBMI" for short) involving the luring of these "evil" creatures across the dimensional border and enslaving them.

What did he find when he got to the HQ?

A party.

The most twisted, sickening party anyone has ever dreamed of.

Wealthy humans were torturing these "evil" creatures to death, then bathing in their blood. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, I'm sure, but that's all you really see in the flashbacks.

Villan_1's world turned upside-down. This was counter to everything he ever believed in. These humans were doing things a thousand times worse than any crime he'd ever seen one of the "evil" creatures do.

He snapped, and ended up killing all of the humans at the party. Pet arrived (presumably having been held up fighting some guards or something) in time to see Villan_1 standing in a huge puddle of human blood, with his hands and feet covered in the stuff. The flashback ends there.

Now Villan_1 has done a 180 and believes that all humans are bad and must be destroyed. Pet refuses to interfere with Villan_1's descent into madness, only lending his hand to him when it is Villan_1's will for him to do so. He

What's Villan_1's alignment?

Lawful Good, of course. (Don't ask me about Pet's alignment. He's too mentally twisted to really be defined. as anything but "Villan_1's hopelessly and mindlessly devoted gay lover who is the reason why they say that 'love is blind, deaf, and generally oblivious.'")

What's my reason behind saying this about Villan_1? Simpel. Since "good" and "evil" are labels and therefore relative, and he honestly belives that he's doing the right thing in the right way by trying to destory the human race, he is Lawful Good. Or at least [Something] Good. Others may disagree, and say that by definition, someone working to destroy humanity is [Something] Evil.

Does anyone follow my train of thought, or am I too far out there in my wild theories? Alignment is all relative. Depending on whether you ask the human villager whom the Paladin just saved, or the Orcish widow whom had her husband killed by the Paladin, you'll get two VERY different answers.

-

I'm not a rare flower
Nor am I a shiny treasure box
I'm just your average gamer girl
Who has a bit of power

I GM for the boys
I write up a set of rules
To make sure they keep a reign
On all their spiffy toys

Er... What is it that I got wrong/you disagreed with? I'd like to hear other people's points of view on this aspect. Was I just too confusing in my rambling? Because I know that I can ramble a lot and then lose people pretty easily if I ramble enough, because my thoughts are organized in a rather "unconventional" fashion (read: everything is littered with a web of tangents, which I may or may not go off on).

-

I'm not a rare flower
Nor am I a shiny treasure box
I'm just your average gamer girl
Who has a bit of power

I GM for the boys
I write up a set of rules
To make sure they keep a reign
On all their spiffy toys

I think one of the worst things any role-player can do is try to equate alignment concepts with real world concepts. In the real world good and evil are only relative because we lack the ability to either know or "measure" it in any quantitative form, thus the only compass we have to go by are our own values....

Thus often we do what we do out of a sense of good (justification for our actions), and anyone negatively effected by that claim it was done intentionally and with malice (fundamental attribution error).

In a game world however, there exists something that goes beyond all this, and categorically states an undeniable good and evil across the board. There is no confusion here, and all spells, items and deities can instantly recognize the different without problem and in a world with omniscient and omnipresent deities who embody an alignment it becomes something which is not judged by those around you (thats reputation), but instead by the internal knowledge of the actual consequences to your actions. It doesn't matter if nobody saw you do it, the action has alignment consequences and those are applied even if you are the only one who will ever know.

So any attempt to relate this to the media, to movies, to the real world or anything else is like trying to compare apples to moons

Exactly. By attempting to relate it to the real world, or to use real world concepts like relative goodness you are drifting further away from the concept of alignment in an RPG.

One of the key factors of alignment is that it is actually a tangible force, one that can repel or disrupt, and one that can "taint". Not only that but it is also immutable and unhidable to certain magic.

This is enough to make it totally foreign and completely incompatible with correlations to the real world. Only when this has been accepted and embraced is it possible to understand and successfully use Alignment.